The development community has made impressive gains over the past two decades on accountability for foreign assistance and development—monitoring, evaluation, use of data and evidence, and transparency. These instruments have helped to improve the effectiveness of foreign assistance and give U.S. stakeholders greater assurance that it is well used. These accountability gains are grounded in the recognition that solutions for development will not come from Washington, Brussels, or Beijing, but from the country and people who are supposed to benefit from international aid.

An initial milestone in accountability policy was the Bush administration’s establishment in 2004 of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) as an institution built on the use of specific good governance criteria to determine who could qualify as a recipient. Once selected, MCC co-designs programs with the recipient government, ensures they are grounded in rigorous assessments and evaluations, and makes criteria and findings publicly available. The establishment of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2003 and its rigorous use of data was another stepping stone.

The Obama administration continued this trend, especially with evaluation and transparency of aid information. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) issued a first-class evaluation policy in 2011 and significantly ramped up the use of evaluations, with over 1,100 since the adoption of the policy. The administration introduced evaluation requirements for all foreign assistance agencies, which—other than USAID and MCC—lacked the practice of using evaluations. The Obama administration also committed to aid transparency, joining the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and directing all agencies engaged in foreign assistance to make aid data publicly available.

Read the full article about foreign assistance accountability by Susanna Campbell and George Ingram at Brookings.