Views from the Center

Here I propose three questions that can allow us to tackle the all-too-often abstract concept of “accountability” for gender equality in a more concrete way.

The capacity for donors to evaluate and learn from development activities is crucial for supporting evidence-based decision-making and ultimately, aid effectiveness. This blog post sets out a new approach to scoring agencies on their evaluation and learning and are keen to get feedback on the proposed approach.

Efforts to make aid more effective in the last two decades have given prominence to "country ownership." With true country ownership, aid is supposed to follow the priorities of recipient countries, rather than those of the funders. Yet funders have their priorities too. So recipients and funders have sought to resolve this potential conflict through policy dialogue and alignment of priorities. My new paper, "What is 'Country Ownership'?" explores this basic problem using a formal model to unravel three interrelated factors affecting country ownership.

In the world of foreign aid flows, the idea of paying for outcomes rather than inputs has a long history. Yet despite regular proclamations of interest in such approaches, the share of funding that is linked to outputs or outcomes instead of activities and processes remains quite small.