The past decade has seen increased attention to aid effectiveness and a more critical view of how donor countries and agencies provide aid. High-level meetings in Paris and Accra have reached consensus on the principles of what constitutes high-quality aid. But, there has been no consistent measure of how well donors comply with these principles.
Until now. On Tuesday, October 5, 2010 Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution unveiled a new set of measures in the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) assessment. QuODA compares the aid quality of 31 donor countries and multilateral agencies, and separately compares 152 development agencies, across four dimensions: Maximizing Efficiency, Fostering Institutions, Reducing Burden, and Transparency and Learning. These measures are then displayed in a QuODA Diamond that provides a snapshot of how each donor or agency is doing and makes it possible to readily compare performance across donors or agencies.
J. Brian Atwood, dean of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, served as a discussant at the event. On Monday, October 4, 2010 Atwood was nominated by the United States Government for the position of Development Assistance Committee (DAC) chair.
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