Spring 2009

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to share with you an update of the progress Nancy Birdsall, Bill Savedoff, our colleagues and I have made on the Cash on Delivery (COD) Aid initiative.  Since the idea of COD Aid was introduced in the paper Payments for Progress by Nancy and Owen Barder, we have further developed the application of COD Aid to education, have begun thinking about applications to other sectors, and have shared the idea with a range of stakeholders.  Some of these stakeholders are currently exploring the possibility of trying the approach in one or more low-income countries.  The following are a few updates from the past few months.

COD Aid at conferences

In addition to ongoing meetings and seminars with representatives from national governments, donor agencies, private foundations, civil society organizations, and policy and research institutions, we have presented COD Aid at the following conferences and roundtables:

• Education for All Fast Track Initiative Technical Meeting (Tokyo, April, 2008)
• Brookings Institution: What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small (DC, May 2008)
• Hemispheric Think Tank Working Group Meetings (Ottawa, September, 2008 and DC, January, 2009)
• United Nations Financing for Development Conference (Doha, December 2008)
• Aid Watch Launch: What Would the Poor Say? Debates in Aid Evaluation (NYC, February, 2009)
• Johns Hopkins SAIS Development Roundtable (DC, February, 2009)
• World Bank Sustainable Development Network Results Days (DC, March, 2009)
• Global Philanthropy Forum Conference (DC, April, 2009)

Colleagues from CGD and other institutions have graciously presented COD Aid at these and other meetings and conferences.  We welcome other interested individuals to contact us if they would like to do the same.

COD Aid in print publications

Cash on Delivery Aid has been highlighted in publications including Africa: Preserving progress at a time of global crisis, a set of recommendations of the Africa Progress Panel chaired by Kofi Annan and presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and Toward a Brighter Future, the taskforce report completed by the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Taskforce on Development chaired by former Congressman Jim Kolbe and Swedish Minister of Development Gunilla Carlsson. 

Next steps

Nancy, Bill and Kate Vyborny are in the last stage of completing a book entitled Cash on Delivery: A New Approach to Foreign Aid with an Application to Primary Schooling.  I will send an email announcing the launch of the book in late 2009, and it will be featured on the COD Aid page of CGD’s website. 

As I mentioned earlier, interested stakeholders are currently exploring the possibility of implementing COD Aid in one or more low-income countries.  We are excited to support them and other interested stakeholders as they learn about the approach and explore ways to introduce it in specific contexts.

We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the many individuals who have helped us conceptualize the approach, and we look forward to ongoing collaborations.  We appreciate any feedback and/or questions you may have, and welcome you to contact me at any time.

Best wishes,

Ayah Mahgoub
Program Coordinator to the President
Center for Global Development