Cash on Delivery is a new approach to foreign aid that focuses on results, encourages innovation, and strengthens government accountability to citizens rather than donors. Keep up-to-date with CGD’s flagship initiative by signing up for the newsletter.
 |
Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity
Cash on Delivery Aid Update
|
|
September 2013
As a new season has begun, the COD Aid team finds itself engaging in more and more conversations with aid agencies that want to explore how they can implement features of COD Aid in their programs. Some highlights over the last few months include Todd Moss answering questions from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and our presentation to an audience of bilateral and multilateral agencies at workshop convened by the African Development Bank and German Development Institute. We often have to remind our audiences, as Bill Savedoff does in his blog post below, that just because it pays for performance doesn’t mean it’s COD Aid; the the COD Aid approach was designed with the idea of changing the aid relationship between governments. Let's hope that we'll soon be seeing more tests of this kind of outcomes-oriented, "hands-off" funder approach!
Best Wishes,
Rita Perakis
Program Associate
Center for Global Development
|
Seen and Heard:
|
|
Many aid agencies have been experimenting with various approaches to linking funding to results. These approaches are laudable but, as Bill Savedoff explains in this blog post, paying for performance is not necessarily COD Aid. The purpose of COD Aid’s key features – disbursing funds against independently verified outcomes in a hands-off fashion – is to enable local actors to innovate and long-term solutions to emerge.
Will U.S. government agencies try COD Aid? In his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, CGD’s Todd Moss answered questions about how COD Aid might work and how it can make development assistance more effective. From Todd’s remarks: “Congress could even provide USAID and other agencies space to experiment with innovative pay-for-performance contracts where US taxpayers would only be picking up the bills for actual achievements. We at the Center for Global Development call this Cash-on-Delivery and see it as an opportunity to make aid—and tax dollars—about outcomes, not inputs or even outputs, while also building local management capacity and innovation and reducing transaction costs.” A video of the committee hearing and the full written testimony are available here.
Last spring, the African Development Bank and the German Development Institute convened a workshop to explore aid agencies’ approaches to results-based aid and issues they are encountering in design and implementation. Presentations from the workshop, including a presentation by Rita Perakis on why results-based approaches are needed can be found here, and a summary of the workshop is here.
|
On the Horizon:
|
|
|
|
In a forthcoming paper, Charles Kenny and Bill Savedoff consider whether results-based approaches may be less vulnerable to corruption and misuse of funds than conventional aid approaches that focus on tracking inputs and often don’t produce clear evidence of development outcomes.
Join us in New York on Monday October 7th for the launch of Investing in Social Outcomes: Development Impact Bonds, the final report of the Development Impact Bond Working Group. Development Impact Bonds are a new outcomes-based approach that brings in impact investment to solve development challenges; governments and donors only pay for what works. To learn more about how DIBs work, see our website or this New York Times article by Tina Rosenberg. The launch will be held at the Rockefeller Foundation at 4:30 pm on October 7th - see details here.
|
|
|
