Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog

 

Posts Tagged: QuODA

 

QuODA and the State of U.S. Assistance

November 18, 2011

Posted by in Aid Effectiveness Tags: ,

Connie Veillette

CGD President Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution recently released the new QuODA assessments measuring the quality of donor assistance.  The second edition is based on 2009 data and now provides two years of data by which to judge assistance across four dimensions:  maximizing efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing burden, and transparency and learning.

For a second year, the United States does poorly.  It ranks in the bottom half of three of the dimensions, and scores worse than the previous year on two (maximizing efficiency and reducing burden).  It improved its score modestly on the fostering institutions dimension and improved significantly on transparency and learning.  The latter can be attributed to the new evaluation and learning matrix developed by USAID.

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MCA Monitor Report from the Field Underway in the Republic of Georgia

October 15, 2010

Posted by in Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Tags: ,

Casey Dunning

Greetings from Tbilisi, Georgia, where I’m working to bring you the tenth installment in the MCA Monitor’s Report from the Field series. As many readers know, these reports provide a snapshot-in-time, on-the-ground analysis of individual country experiences with the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) policies and operations. The first nine reports covered countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and focused on the early stages of the MCC compact process: compact development and initial implementation. This report on Georgia’s MCC experience will be the first to focus on the end of a five-year MCC compact.

I’ll be travelling around Georgia to interview key stakeholders—members of the Millennium Challenge Georgia Fund (MCG) which is the accountable entity established to manage the compact, civil society, government representatives, private sector partners, and more—to better understand the five projects in the country’s $395 million MCC compact, interim and anticipated long-term results, and importantly, what happens when the compact comes to a close in April 2011. Read More…

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Shah Charting New Course at USAID

October 13, 2010

Posted by in Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Tags: , ,

Connie Veillette

Observers of U.S. foreign assistance lament the decline of USAID resources, staff and expertise. Many old hands remember the days when it was the global leader in development. Yet, calls to rebuild USAID are everywhere today, from the White House to the State Department to Capitol Hill. President Obama and Secretary Clinton vowed to make USAID the world’s premier development agency and legislation on the Hill clearly seeks to elevate not just development but USAID as well.

Despite some healthy skepticism about whether and how those promises are being fulfilled, a closer look inside the agency suggests some positive changes are underway. Read More…

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