Measuring Aid Quality

The development community has reached a strong consensus, demonstrated by the Paris Declaration, that not only the quantity, but also the quality of aid play an important role in determining the effectiveness of development assistance. However, the debate remains disproportionately focused on the quantity of aid, in part because of the lack of accessible, comparable information on the quality of aid; while OECD-DAC has made significant progress in collecting data on how aid is spent, these are difficult for non-specialists to interpret.

Building on the successful experience of the Center’s Commitment to Development Index, as well as on the work of OECD-DAC, CGD intends to collaborate with the Brookings Institution to develop and publish an annual assessment of the quality of the aid disbursed by official donors, intended for a broad audience including donor agencies, civil society, legislatures and the public. The project aims for useful comparisons across donors, though the data limitations imply that reaching a full index, with the kind of ranking that the CDI presents, will require more extended work beyond the first year of the project. Even in the first stages, however, a prototype assessment could help catalyze more interest in better aid as well as more aid.

An overview of the pilot assessment will be available shortly on this page.

Nancy Birdsall co-leads this initiative with Homi Kharas at the Brookings Institution with input from Commitment to Development Index architect David Roodman and support from Ayah Mahgoub, Elizabeth Mendenhall and Joshua Hermias.

Please email AMahgoub@cgdev.org with comments and suggestions, or to request more information.