June 2011


Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity 

Cash on Delivery Aid | June 2011  

Seen and Heard

In April, Nancy Birdsall presented COD Aid to the Planning Commission of the Government of Pakistan. Nancy and her colleagues have suggested COD Aid as a way for the U.S. to use a portion of its aid to Pakistan to get tangible results and increase Pakistan’s governmental accountability to its people. Wren Elhai examines options for a COD Aid contract in Pakistan’s education sector in this CGD brief.

Bill Savedoff recently presented COD Aid and its application to the water and sanitation sector for a workshop organized by the Gates Foundation. You can read more about COD Aid for water in this concept note.

The World Bank is moving towards adopting a new results-based lending instrument, Program-for-Results. The Bank is approaching the end of a consultation phase for the proposed instrument; read my blog post about a roundtable that CGD hosted here and Alan Gelb’s and Bill Savedoff’s comments here.

The World Bank has incorporated a stronger focus on outcomes in its new education strategy which Nancy has written about here, challenging the Bank to break away from traditional forms of support and finance key outcomes.

During an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Thomas Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control, said that COD Aid is a model “well worth exploring” for tobacco control.

Roll Back Malaria featured COD Aid as an option for sustainable financing of malaria control programs in this presentation.

Following Nancy’s spring presentation at the UK Department for International Development, Rakesh Rajani has sparked a lively discussion about COD Aid with this blog post that highlights promising features of the approach, and suggestions to make it sharper.

A new CGD working paper, TrAid+ Channeling Development Assistance to Results , builds on the COD Aid approach and proposes a new mechanism that creates a market for certified development outputs.

In this blog post, Nancy draws a link between COD Aid and the concepts emphasized in The Tunis Consensus: Targeting Effective Development, a report prepared by the African Development Bank and New Partnership for Africa’s Development that outlines a plan for increasing development effectiveness, rather than aid effectiveness.

 

COD Aid in the Media
  • In this Financial Times article, Oliver Sabot from the Clinton Health Access Initiative endorses the application of COD Aid to sustained malaria control. 
  • Morrison Rwakakamba discusses COD Aid as a potentially effective approach to promote better learning outcomes in Ugandan schools.
  • Jonathan Glennie featured COD Aid in a Guardian blog post, Is cash on delivery the future for aid?.   Guardian readers raised many interesting questions, to which Owen Barder and I responded in a blog post here. 
  • In an effort to modernize Canada’s approach to foreign aid, the Foreign Assistance Reform Network, led by Engineers without Borders, suggests the use of Cash on Delivery Aid in order to promote more creative and cost-effective aid investments.  


On the Horizon
  • The UK Department for International Development continues to pursue a pilot results-based aid program, modeled after COD Aid, in Ethiopia’s education sector this year.
  • A CGD study group led by Tom Bollyky and Amanda Glassman has been launched to explore applications of COD Aid to global tobacco control. Tom’s papers for the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Center for Strategic and International Studies discuss funding options for tobacco control.


Team Update

We are continuing to hear about applications of Cash on Delivery Aid in many contexts and working with a range of organizations to explore possibilities in primary and secondary education, maternal health, malaria control, tobacco control, water, and sanitation.

In many of our discussions and in articles that feature COD Aid, it has been encouraging to see thoughtful questions come up about how COD Aid would work and why it represents a potentially better way of doing aid. We have often argued that COD Aid is not perfect, but should be compared against the counterfactual of how most aid programs operate today, and most importantly, should be tried and evaluated so we can learn from this new approach.

Best wishes for a great summer!


Rita Perakis
Program Coordinator to the President