But to the extent the overall foreign assistance system is poorly managed to deliver, it is worth looking at who bears responsibility for those failures. The answer, surely, is the institutions implementing the programs—the ones who buy the goods and services ultimately purchased with US funding. It...

In the UK’s newly released international development strategy, the government commits to upping bilateral finance to 75 percent of the FCDO’s total aid spend by 2025. Here, we look at what this means for budgets, and for the UK’s international role.

In the international development community, “country ownership” is considered a good thing, while criticisims of foreign aid are based on the idea that this is the problem. But only about a third of assistance is actually managed by those it is intended to help.

The UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s famous two-test decision rule for increasing the UK’s aid budget back to 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) is expected to be met next year. If that holds true, it means that the UK has a little less than ...

This blog post is based in part on a presentation delivered by Nancy Birdsall on March 19th, 2022 as part of the MIT Seminar XXI program, hosted by Kenneth Oye.

Recently, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) published the annual statistics summarizing how much foreign aid its 30 member states, including Austria, provided in 2021, loudly trumpeting the all time high levels of ODA achieved. It’s a good time to reflect on the uncomfortable tension...

This blog summarizes findings from a new paper, which uses a survey of officials from development agencies and partner countries to explore these questions. Our results show that respondents think the effectiveness agenda remains useful, yet express demand for change to ensure it keeps pace with the...