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Aid agencies are investing more in energy projects than ever before, but will they succeed? Not if they ignore the key obstacle to progress: governments that choose the status quo over serious reforms.
There is a lot of chatter about the reasons for Britain’s relative success in the Olympic games. This transformation in Britain’s sporting performance has generated a raft of tortured analogies with various non-sporting challenges, such as industrial and education policies (on which Britain’s performance is rather less stellar). So I’m leaping on the bandwagon with two lessons for international development.
I’ve been working on the idea of Cash on Delivery (COD) for some years under the hypothesis that if we could define good outcome indicators, someone would step forward to buy them. So what would happen if an organization came forward with a plan to supply a verified outcome in return for a set unit payment after delivery? In a sense, this is what Dispensers for Safe Water, an Evidence Action program, is currently doing.
Now the Government of India and the World Bank have adopted an approach using principles we describe as Cash on Delivery (COD). The program follows three of these principles by linking payments to outcomes, not inputs; independently verifying outcomes; and allowing recipients to take the lead. India has become the single largest payer for outcomes in a nationwide sanitation initiative.
“For too long there has been a taboo about tackling [corruption] head on. The summit will change that.” That, at least, is the optimistic pronouncement from the leader of Her Majesty’s Government ahead of the UK anti-corruption summit in London this week.
In a recent blog, Duncan Green wonders if “Pay by Results” (PbR) programs are overhyped and questions whether foreign aid agencies and NGOs should be pursuing them at all. Only a few countries have stepped into this new way of doing aid. PbR may be overhyped at the same time that at least one type of PbR is underutilized.
Dear Administrator Smith,
In addition to the initiatives you hope to institutionalize in the next 10 months, we hope you’ll also seize the opportunity to put USAID in the forefront of testing a new approach to delivering aid.
I’ve been reading news of corruption scandals in Brazil with a great deal of sadness. I lived in Brazil during its return to democracy and experienced first-hand the hope and optimism that came with that transition. In a recent policy paper, I argue that decisions about funding projects in other countries should depend more on the results achieved by those countries than by formal actions meant to control corruption.
I’m always a little anxious introducing a topic at a workshop without knowing if the presentations that follow will support or contradict my points. So it was with some trepidation that I spoke earlier this month at a SIDA workshop in Stockholm, associated with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s launch of “Results Based Financing Approaches (RBFA) — What Are They?”.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is the newest funding source to address climate change in developing countries. With $10 billion in pledges – and $5 billion committed to mitigation – the GCF is at a critical juncture because its Board is considering the rules and protocols it will follow when it pays for results. We believe the GCF can learn a lot from existing results-based aid agreements and the state of REDD+ finance (summarized in the forthcoming report of a CGD Working Group) which demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of pay for results approaches.
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