President Nancy Birdsall's piece on aid effectiveness was featured in the Huffington Post.
From the Article
This is a joint post with Rita Perakis.
Late this month representatives of donor and developing country governments, civil society organizations, think tanks, and the private sector will meet in Busan, South Korea, to review progress since the signing of the Paris Declaration of Aid Effectiveness in 2005. Rita and I will be among them and we hope, along with many others, that the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness will mark a milestone of sorts, where the aid effectiveness movement, drawing on the consensus forged at previous meetings in Rome, Paris, and Accra, turns from words to action.
As a nudge in that direction, the Center for Global Development and the Brookings Institution offer a newly updated quantitative assessment of how well donors are living up to their aid effectiveness commitments. CGD is releasing today the second edition of the Brookings-CGD Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) assessment. Brookings senior fellow Homi Kharas and I designed QuODA as a ranking of donor countries and agencies according to four dimensions of aid quality that draw upon international declarations: maximizing efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing burden, and transparency and learning.
Using 31 quantified indicators applied to the four dimensions, QuODA finds mixed but overall slow progress, consistent with the qualitative conclusions of the OECD's report on Progress in Implementing the Paris Declaration. For indicators, QuODA draws upon the OECD Development Assistance Committee's Creditor Reporting System data as well as the 2011 Paris Monitoring Survey data, offering a detailed analysis of donors' performance.