center-for-effective-aid-policy

The Future of Development - Pakhuis de Zwijger

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 12:26:48 GMT

Thank you for a wonderful event

Almost 300 attendees showed up in Pakhuis de Zwijger to hear development experts and MPs discuss the future of Dutch development, and how it can be made more cost-effective.

On some points the experts can agree:

Smarter use of evidence will make Dutch development assistance more cost-effective.
Any cuts to development assistance must be done with care and based on evidence of what works best - not based on which groups have the most lobbying capacity.

What is smart use of evidence? CEAP recommends drawing inspiration from successful policies already being implemented in countries such as Norway and the United States. We recommend the following for Dutch ODA:

Require impact evaluations to include a cost-analysis, to make it possible to assess a programme’s cost-effectiveness. Norway and The United States have both introduced this requirement already.
For programmes aimed at improving livelihoods, introduce cash-benchmarking to ensure a high standard across the entire portfolio.
Increase the proportion of spending going towards the poorest countries, where money goes the furthest.

A special thank you to KVS , the royal association of Dutch economists, for co-hosting the event, and to Jan-Dirk Koch, Chief Science Officer in the ministry of foreign affairs, for delivering the keynote speech.

An introduction to Dutch development aid

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 10:47:12 GMT

An introduction to Dutch development aid

What characterises Dutch development assistance?
What role does effectiveness play in policy decisions?
What will the latest election results mean for Dutch development cooperation in the future?

With this report, the Center for Effective Aid Policy gives you a quick introduction to Dutch development cooperation by laying out the simple yet important first things one needs to know when working in the field.

Click to read view the report:

Can cash-transfers improve government aid spending?

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 08:49:16 GMT

Can cash-transfers and cash-benchmarking improve aid spending? Perhaps! Hear why in this talk we gave with GiveDirectly at EAGx Nordics 2023.

How can the UK best help women and girls internationally?

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 08:41:23 GMT

How can the FCDO's women and girls initiative become as cost-effective as GiveWell ’s top recommended charities? GiveWell estimates that top charities save a life per £4000 spent, more than a hundred times as effective as the average charity - a high bar to beat!

Read our March 2023 report with three recommendations for how the UK can achieve this:

Our recommendations for Dutch ODA

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:41:13 GMT

Three ODA recommendations for the Dutch political committees

Read our three recommendations for how the Netherlands can achieve a cost-effective development assistance. (Letter in Dutch)

Workshop for His Majesty's Treasury

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 16:40:11 GMT

Our message for His Majesty's Treasury

This July, our director had the pleasure of presenting on the cost-effectiveness in development for at His Majesty's Treasury in the United Kingdom.

The central message was this: The effectiveness of development interventions vary by orders of magnitude. We can save and improve many more lives by focusing our funding on the very best.

We're looking forward to continuing the conversation and ensure UK development cooperation delivers the highest value for money!

At the Danish People's Meeting

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 16:40:37 GMT

Thank you for a great folkemøde!

The Danish People's meeting (folkemødet) is always a treat to attend. Regular citizens and politicians alike come together to celebrate democracy and debate every topic imaginable.

This summer we had the pleasure of hosting a panel discussion on the cost-effectiveness of Danish development efforts with members of parliament across the political spectrum.

Don't hesitate to come and say hi, if you're at folkemødet next year!

Why cost-effectiveness matters

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 15:19:04 GMT

Why cost-effectiveness matters

Not all development programs have the same effects for the same costs.

Suppose you must decide between one of two aid interventions in Africa:

One delivers deworming medicine to school children
The others provides funding for school uniforms

Which should you choose? A child who is sick with a parasite-infection, will struggle to stay in school. On the other hand, parents who cannot afford school uniforms might opt not to send their child to school at all

It is not easy to predict in advance which will do more to increase school attendance. When development researchers measured the impact of each intervention, they found one to be many times more effective than the other.

Every $100 spent delivering deworming medicine buys almost fourteen additional years of school attendance . Every $100 spent on funding school uniforms, on the other hand, buys less than one year of additional school attendance .

With new evidence in mind, deworming stands out as the better choice. By following the science we can give many more children access to school, something so vital that it is considered a human right .

In practice, the choices are never so clear-cut. Ensuring lasting development requires making progress on many different fronts. Not all development goals can be easily compared. Not all interventions can be cheaply measured.

But even small differences in cost-effectiveness add up to massive differences in impact between large scale aid programs. The total amount of Official Development Aid (ODA) in 2021 was $180 Billion. Simply moving funding from one life-saving aid program to another can enormously increase the number of real people whose lives are saved.

Carefully evaluating the effects of interventions and spending our limited resources on the very best projects, is vital if Official Development Assistance (ODA) is to meet its objective of promoting the economic development and welfare of developing countries. At the Center for Effective Aid Policy, we don’t look for interventions offering lower costs per life saved because we are stingy, but precisely the opposite: because we recognize that we only have so much money available and we want to spend it best in order to help as many people as possible.

The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is a highly cost-effective government aid program started in 2003. Between 2004 and 2007, the cost per life saved was estimated to be just $2,450 . PEPFAR saved millions of lives, and is an outstanding example of the positive difference development aid can make. Had the US government instead spent PEPFAR’s budget on building PlayPumps ( A poorly functioning merry-go-round which pumps water , at the cost of $14,000 each) millions of lives would have been lost unnecessarily.

Although ODA never goes to one single intervention but is distributed across several projects, the risk of funding cost-ineffective or even potentially harmful interventions is real. Cost-effectiveness analysis is a tool to prevent misallocation of aid budgets. It is precisely so important because the difference between various aid interventions' impact is so serious.

Development aid projects have many more objectives than just saving lives, given that their ultimate goal is to promote a sustainable and lasting development of whole communities, as well as individual flourishing. We care not only about saving lives, but also about making those lives as secure and enjoyable as everyone deserves. For example, funding might go to projects targeting women empowerment, or climate mitigation. Such less tangible objectives of development aid might be hard to quantify and therefore be mistakenly ignored in the cost-effectiveness analysis. It is therefore crucial to design appropriate methods that will take these complexities into consideration.

Given the persisting high number of people globally living in extreme poverty (698 million as of 2021; 9% of world’s population ), it is a moral responsibility of aid-granting governments to spend their aid budgets the best they can: to compare possible interventions, to target projects which actually improve the recipients’ lives, and to fund as many of them as possible.

At CEAP, we aim to represent the recipients of the development aid and advocate for funding interventions promoting their interests. We believe in a detailed, research-based analysis of aid projects in order to shift the available funding to those that benefit the largest number of people the most.

Six recommendations for Swedish development aid

mathias.bonde@aidpolicy.org (Mathias Bonde) — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:15:43 GMT

Six aid recommendations for the new Swedish government

The new Swedish government coalition, have agreed in its founding document ( Tidöavtalet ) to abandon the country's historic 1% GNI aid target. While we at CEAP recommend against cuts to aid, if cuts are to happen they should be done with cost-effectiveness in mind.

Read below our brief, shared with Swedish decision makers, featuring six recommendations for how Sweden can maintain its position as a world leader in development aid while reducing costs.