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Six operations have been approved for the World Bank’s new financing instrument, Program for Results, with several more operations under consideration. CGD hosted a discussion about Program for Results, an instrument that ties disbursements to the delivery of results, at the end of last year.
Salud Mesoamerica 2015, an initiative implemented by the Inter-American Development Bank with support from the Gates Foundation, the Carlos Slim Health Institute and the Spanish government, has been launched to support Mesoamerican governments in reaching the health Millennium Development Goals and reduce health equity gaps. As CGD’s Amanda Glassman discusses here, Salud Mesoamerica is focused on testing five innovations in health aid, one of which is linking funds directly to results. Countries will get back half of their investments in health services if their work shows measurable progress.
Twaweza, a citizen-centered initiative in East Africa, has launched an experiment known as “local Cash on Delivery” to test whether outcomes-based payments to schools and teachers improve student learning in Tanzania. An independent randomized evaluation will be led by the Jameel Poverty Action Lab. The evaluation design summary is available here.
A new report about foreign aid to Myanmar highlights Cash on Delivery as an example of an innovative approach that could make new aid flows to Myanmar effective. The report’s authors, Lex Rieffel and James W. Fox, encourage donors providing aid to Myanmar to try COD Aid as an unconventional approach that limits bureaucratic hurdles and focuses on results.
In a recent series of blog posts reflecting on development programs that have been influenced by COD Aid, Nancy Birdsall and Bill Savedoff discuss implementation challenges of results-based funding. These include the pressure on donor agencies to be ‘impatient’ and disburse funds irrespective of results achieved, and the limitations that setting results targets imposes on aid programs. Nancy and Bill propose ways that these challenges can be mitigated in program design.
Rita Perakis discusses in this blog post a recent survey which finds support in developing countries for a COD Aid approach. The idea of paying governments for specific, measurable improvements in development outcomes was one of the most popular ideas for aid reform, in a survey of 640 development policymakers and practitioners designed to determine the effect of the Millennium Challenge Corporation approach.
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