March 2011

Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity

Cash on Delivery Aid | March 2011

Seen and Heard

Nancy Birdsall presented Cash on Delivery Aid at a recent seminar for the UK Department for International Development. Attendees, including DFID staff and participants from think tanks and NGOs in the UK, provided good feedback on COD Aid, which DFID plans to pilot this year. The presentation is now posted on our website. See Nancy’s blog post about the seminar here.

DFID remains committed to increasing results-based aid; this summary of the agency’s recent aid review describes a results-based aid program designed to get more girls to complete secondary education in Ethiopia. The program will follow the COD Aid model, by “offering local schools a financial reward for every extra girl that completes secondary education.” As a part of the aid review, DFID also produced country summaries of where it will work and the results that funds are expected to achieve.

Andrew Rogerson of the OECD Development Assistance Committee has published this draft brief, What if Development Aid Really Rewarded Results? Revisiting the COD Aid Model, in which he discusses how COD Aid differs from existing forms of aid and what it means for aid effectiveness. Read Nancy’s blog post about the brief here.

This European Report on Development about financing for social protection examines a new application of COD Aid in detail, and concludes that “If there are financing needs for social transfers in your strategy, then COD-aid could possibly be a way of engaging the donors, without inviting them to share the driver’s seat.”

We ran out of copies of Cash on Delivery: A new approach to foreign aid with an application to primary schooling and printed a second edition with a new preface. Read the entire preface in this blog post.

COD Aid in the Media

Tina Rosenberg featured COD Aid in a New York Times opinion piece, How to Protect Foreign Aid? Improve It and follow up piece, A Pay-for-Performance Evaluation. New York Times readers shared lots of reactions and Nancy responded in a blog post here.
In this column from the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting discusses the debate around results-based aid and Nancy’s influence, through COD Aid, in encouraging experimentation with new aid policies.
Analyses of DFID’s recent bilateral aid review, in the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and this blog from the Overseas Development Institute, discuss DFID’s plans to test Cash on Delivery, which will involve making payments only when results have been achieved and verified.
This blog post at Bottom Up Thinking refers to issues discussed in our new COD Aid book preface and discusses the importance about focusing on outcomes over processes in foreign aid.
Owen Barder writes here that COD Aid is worth trying because it would allow governments of recipient countries to be accountable to their citizens for the progress they make.
In this Foreign Policy article, Nancy Birdsall, Wren Elhai and Molly Kinder write that COD Aid could give traction to much-needed reforms in Pakistan.
Ben Ramalingam cites this blog by Nancy in this discussion of how the agenda for results-based aid fits in with the complex world in which agencies work.
In this youtube presentation about innovations in foreign aid, Matt Morris highlights Cash on Delivery as one of the exciting opportunities taking place in the aid world.

On the Horizon

DFID will be launching a COD Aid-type program in the education sector in Ethiopia this year and is making plans to apply the approach in other countries as well.
Bill Savedoff is finalizing a working paper that outlines possible indicators for applications of COD Aid to the health sector.
CGD visiting fellow Tom Bollyky is continuing to investigate the application of COD Aid to tobacco control, after he published this report about U.S. engagement in international tobacco control.

Team Update

There has been a lot of activity for the COD team in the last couple of months as we have been sharing our experiences from developing and researching the approach with DFID staff who are charged with implementing pilot projects this year. We are encouraged that DFID is delivering on commitments made over the past year to pilot Cash on Delivery Aid, and to sharpen its focus on results. We hope that others will follow suit!

As Cash on Delivery evolves from being a theoretical concept about how to improve existing aid relationships to a series of tangible pilot projects on the ground, we want to emphasize the importance of properly evaluating the approach. Appropriate evaluation strategies should be built into project designs to ensure that we can learn from aid innovations like COD Aid and allow them to contribute to a base of evidence about how a new aid modality affects donor and recipient behavior and changes the way programs work in different settings.

Stay tuned for more news about how COD Aid-influenced pilot projects develop!

Best wishes,

Rita Perakis
Program Coordinator to the President