The Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA)

This report is the third edition of our effort to measure the quality of Official Development Assistance (ODA), now updated to use 2012 data—the most recent available—from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). QuODA assesses aid quality for 31 DAC member countries and multilateral agencies according to four dimensions of aid quality that draw upon international declarations: maximizing efficiency, fostering institutions, reducing burden, and transparency and learning. We find that there has been a mixed picture on improvements in the quality of aid since the first edition of this report, which used ODA data from 2008. On the one hand, there are visible and significant gains in fostering institutions, and in transparency and learning. However, there has been almost no change in maximizing efficiency or in reducing the burden on recipient countries. For the first time, we also include in this edition an analysis of 2012 data on a subset of non-DAC donors as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We find that, using DAC criteria, the quality of aid of these non-DAC donors is less than for DAC donors, suggesting that these countries do not substitute for DAC ODA in terms of the effectiveness of the system as a whole. In an environment where DAC ODA is stagnant, these findings suggest that there is indeed good reason to continue to work on norms for high quality aid for DAC and non-DAC donors alike.