Natural resources are being discovered in more countries, both rich and poor. Many of the new and aspiring resource exporters are low-income countries that are still receiving substantial levels of foreign aid. Resource discoveries open up enormous opportunities, but also expose producing...

The World Bank’s new Program for Results (PforR) instrument is only the third instrument approved by its Board and the first to directly link disbursements to results. Designed to support programs of service delivery, the program is still in its early stages. This paper provides an overview of...

A common objection to results-based programs is that they are somehow more vulnerable to corruption. This paper explains why results-based approaches to foreign aid may be less vulnerable to corruption than the traditional approaches which monitor and track the purchase and delivery of inputs...

The Millennium Villages Project is a high profile, multi-country development project that has aimed to serve as a model for ending rural poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The project became the subject of controversy when the methodological basis of early claims of success was questioned. The...

The idea of applying a Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid) approach to the health sector has been raised many times, particularly in relation to addressing malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and water. After assessing the challenges of applying COD Aid in the health sector, this paper considers 10...

Health is one of the largest and most complex aid sectors: 16 percent of all aid went to the health sector in 2009. While many stress the importance of aid effectiveness, there are limited quantitative analyses of the quality of health aid. In this paper, we apply Birdsall and Kharas’s Quality...

In post-conflict Liberia, the National Health Plan set out a process for transitioning from emergency to sustainability under government leadership. The Liberia Health Sector Pool Fund, which consists of DfID, Irish Aid, UNICEF, and UNHCR, was established to fund this plan and mitigate this...

After a decade of rapid growth in average incomes, many countries have attained middle-income country (MIC) status. At the same time, the total number of poor people hasn’t fallen as much as one might expect and, as a result, most of the world’s poor now live in MICs. In fact, there are up...

Global health aid is exceedingly complex. It encompasses more than one hundred bilateral agencies, global funds, and independent initiatives that interact with an equally complex and diverse set of institutions involved in financing and providing health care in developing countries. Numerous...

The United States government has made repeated declarations over the last decade to align its assistance programs behind developing countries’ priorities. By utilizing public attitude surveys for 42 African and Latin American countries, this paper examines how well the US has implemented this...