Focusing on Aid Effectiveness

Resources devoted to international development and poverty alleviation are growing rapidly. Official development assistance from traditional donors has risen sharply, exceeding US$100 billion per year since 2005. Private aid organizations might add another $60 billion per year. New bilateral donors, like China and India, add a further $10 billion. Equaling the growth in development resources has been a dramatic proliferation in development actors and organizations: there are at least 46 official bilateral donors, 260 multilateral aid agencies, and tens of thousands of development-oriented NGOs, foundations, church groups and for-profit corporations. Millions of individuals in rich and poor countries alike are now engaged in aid as advocates, social networkers and direct givers.

These trends offer great opportunities for eliminating poverty worldwide, but also point to a rapidly changing reality within the aid industry. Donor diversity, aid fragmentation and volatility, and expanding aid modalities are industry features that could be harnessed to boost aid effectiveness. Yet old mechanisms for information sharing, coordination, planning and administration—designed for a small cadre of like-minded donors—are not equipped for this task: instead, these features often amplify problems with waste, overlap and recipient burdens.

The Wolfensohn Center’s aid effectiveness project monitors the new realities of the aid industry and researches innovations in aid coordination, knowledge management, and evaluation that could serve as a new aid architecture. Finding ways to strengthen scaling-up, provide innovative financing mechanisms to transform volatility, decrease transaction costs, generate information, and reveal natural divisions of labor are central to the center’s research agenda. Outputs are multi-faceted, including scholarly research pieces, advisory partnerships with aid practioners, forums for sharing best practices, and high-level dialogue with world leaders.

Research and Commentary

Action on Aid: Steps Toward Making Aid More Effective

A Case Study of Aid Effectiveness in Ethiopia

A Case Study of Aid Effectiveness in Kenya: Volatility and Fragmentation of Foreign Aid, with a Focus on Health

Aid Effectiveness in Cambodia

Post-Tsunami Aid Effectiveness in Aceh: Proliferation and Coordination in Reconstruction

Better Aid: Responding to Gaps in Effectiveness

Scaling Up Through Aid: The Real Challenge

Scaling Up: A Framework and Lessons for Development Effectiveness from Literature and Practice

Reform the Aid System to Fix the Slow-Burning Global Poverty Crisis (PDF)

Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility

The California Consensus: Can Private Aid End Global Poverty?

Competition, Not Coordination: Making European Foreign Aid More Effective

Trends and Issues in Development Aid

The New Reality of Aid