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Blog Post
July 06, 2023
USAID administrator Samantha Power’s aim to advance localization—with at least a quarter of funds going directly to local partners—has been widely lauded. A recent USAID report on localization indicates progress towards this goal, but major operational and contractual directions about how to impleme...
Blog Post
March 09, 2023
Dana Hyde showed tremendous leadership and wisdom as the fourth head of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), serving for nearly three years during President Obama’s second term. These brief notes on her leadership are our way of providing a tribute to her major contributions to MCC’s effectiv...
Blog Post
March 31, 2022
The effort to recycle unneeded SDRs from wealthy countries to poor countries was dealt a major setback in an omnibus spending deal recently passed by the US Congress. The final measure failed to include language authorizing the US Treasury to recycle 15 billion SDRs, worth about $21 billion, to the ...
Blog Post
March 18, 2022
Nearly six months into the fiscal year, Congress finally delivered an FY22 spending bill last week. But even after stalled negotiations prompted worries that lawmakers would be unable to reach a deal at all, the final measure is something of a disappointment—failing to deliver sufficient resources t...
POLICY PAPERS
October 28, 2021
Results-based financing (RBF) is one of several broad approaches to finance official development assistance (ODA) “that attempt[s] to connect at least a portion of payment to the verified achievement of results.” Despite some relatively high-profile programs and pilots—and broad interest and curiosi...
POLICY PAPERS
August 11, 2021
To help the US government make broader use of pull approaches, this policy paper surveys the ways in which US government authorities, budgetary rules, and procurement approaches either facilitate or constrain use of pull mechanisms to support R&D. It specifically focused on the budgetary “scorin...
Blog Post
October 15, 2019
Efforts to make aid more effective in the last two decades have given prominence to "country ownership." With true country ownership, aid is supposed to follow the priorities of recipient countries, rather than those of the funders. Yet funders have their priorities too. So recipients and ...
WORKING PAPERS
October 11, 2019
This paper illustrates the tradeoff between country ownership and funders’ priorities with a formal model in which aid is governed by a contract to produce a jointly desired outcome. The model generalizes the Principal-Agent approaches for studying aid which treat countries as having multiple ...
Blog Post
July 26, 2019
In the world of foreign aid flows, the idea of paying for outcomes rather than inputs has a long history. Yet despite regular proclamations of interest in such approaches, the share of funding that is linked to outputs or outcomes instead of activities and processes remains quite small.