A bi-partisan change to USAID

by Matt Gyory

On July 28, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, including Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard Lugar of Indiana, introduced a bill to improve U.S. development efforts by updating the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for the 21st century. The introduction of this bill was part of a larger effort to improve USAID and increase its role in U.S. development efforts.

Senator Lugar has been particularly vocal in his support of changing the way USAID conducts business. He has written an op-ed in which he outlines many of the features to be found in the bi-partisan bill, including the need for increased staff and tracking project outputs to determine successes and best practices. Recently, Senator Lugar wrote a letter to the editors of the Washington Post to highlight the difficulty the Obama administration has had in finding a USAID Administrator.

In addition to the bi-partisan support and momentum this bill represents, it is a new commitment of USAID to the goals of transparent data and the measurement of its activities. Both Sections five (page nine of the bill in particular) and section six of the bill highlight the need for USAID to collect data and perform monitoring and evaluation assessments on their programs. These sections of the bill will improve the effectiveness of USAID’s efforts and possibly provide the development community as a whole with best practices and certainly with a surfeit of data on USAID’s activities.

To ensure that the information USAID will now collect will be used, Section 10 of the bill recommends that the U.S. fully engage and comply with the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI was one of the outcomes of last year’s high level forum in Accra. The type of transparent information IATI compliance would entail will give U.S. and international aid practitioners a greater wealth of information to ensure more effective aid.

The two parts of the bill highlighted here are clearly related. There is little point in collecting all of information USAID will be required to collect if no one will ever see it. The two major points are also key issues for Development Gateway. Aid effectiveness has been a key point of our work and we have begun to emphasize the possibilities that more transparent information can offer. We look forward to the progression of this bill and hope that whatever final version is submitted to President Obama for his signature contains these provisions to ensure more transparent, effective aid.

The full text of the legislation is available here.