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This spring, Nancy Birdsall, Bill Savedoff, and Rita Perakis travelled to East Africa to learn about progress in the design and implementation of COD Aid pilot programs. The first stop was Ethiopia, where the UK Department for International Development is piloting the first aid program based on COD Aid. Nancy presented COD Aid at a DfID regional conference in Addis Ababa, and Nancy and Rita met with DfID staff and Ethiopian government officials to learn more about the nationwide education sector pilot. A summary of the pilot design and CGD recommendations can be found here.
In Tanzania, the team held meetings with representatives from several donor countries and the Tanzanian government who have expressed interest in testing the COD Aid approach. Nancy and Bill presented at a “learning event on COD Aid” organized by the Swedish Embassy and attended by government representatives from several ministries. Their proposals for how COD Aid could be piloted in the education sector in Tanzania are in this report. Recommendations include expanding on the most promising results of a Twaweza experiment that aims to test the levels at which incentive payments can have the most impact on primary school learning outcomes.
Nancy and Rita also travelled to Rwanda, where plans for a second DfID pilot based on COD Aid are underway. DfID staff are working with the government of Rwanda to design a new results-based aid program as a part of sector budget support in education.
The Center for Global Development, in partnership with the German Development Institute, held a workshop in Bonn, Germany in April titled Results Based Aid: Implementation of COD Aid and Outcome-Oriented Approaches. Representatives from approximately 15 different organizations, including aid agencies, foundations and think tanks, convened to discuss both theoretical issues and practical implementation challenges with results based-aid. A summary of the workshop is available here. Bill Savedoff further discusses issues from the workshop and his views on aid innovation in a European context in this blog post.
In May, Nancy presented COD Aid at a World Bank conference, Results-Based Approaches in the Energy Sector. Her presentation, which includes ideas for how COD Aid can be used to increase access to energy, and other presentations from the event can be found on the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program website.
In a recent joint report, Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at CGD and Thomas J. Bollyky, senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, propose the use of COD Aid as a new incentive mechanism for tobacco control in low- and middle-income countries. The report includes a breakdown of how such a pilot could work in Uttar Pradesh, India.
A review of results-based management in development cooperation, recently published by the Swedish foundation Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, highlights benefits and implementation challenges of the COD Aid approach.
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