Sara Harcourt

For the first time in more than a decade (excluding years of exceptional debt relief), global levels of development assistance decreased in 2011. Preliminary figures released by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) last week show that global official development assistance (ODA) dropped by $3.5 billion between 2010 and 2011, representing a 2.7 percent decrease.

Sliding in just before the holidays, the OECD-DAC released its final update to the 2010 data on official development assistance (ODA) flows. The DAC — or, Development Assistance Committee — is a grouping of the world’s wealthiest donor countries. It tracks donor spending on development finance and helps coordinate development policy globally to improve spending

Ahead of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in South Korea this week, we asked you to send messages of support to Secretary Clinton to make bold commitments on transparent and accountable aid. And as part of the ONE Act a Week, almost 100 of you responded! In this PDF you can read the

Sara Messer reports live from Busan, South Korea The Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness isn’t even finished yet, but we can already log big wins for transparent and accountable aid. In Secretary Clinton’s keynote address at the forum in South Korea, she officially announced that the United States would be signing the International

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is both a global voluntary initiative and a common standard for publishing aid information that aims to make it “easier to access, use and understand.” It was formed following the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action as a way to implement those commitments made by donors in Accra on aid

Action: 21. Time: 5 minutes. Level of difficulty: Easy. In less than two weeks, government leaders, NGOs heads and even private sector representatives will be meeting in Busan, South Korea to discuss how to make aid and other development resources more effective. Why should you care? Because better aid means better accountability to recipients and

At ONE we spend a lot of time and effort making sure that citizens in developing countries get the resources they need to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease. We hold wealthy governments to account for commitments they made to increase development assistance, and we fight cuts to foreign aid—like in the US where it

Photo courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons. Fifty years ago today, in 1961, John F. Kennedy established the US Agency for International Development to unify US foreign assistance efforts and focus on long term development solutions. Today, we can look back and celebrate all that USAID has accomplished over the years and consider the future of

Last week, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) board met and, among other decisions, approved changes to the selection criteria that it uses to assess candidate countries’ eligibility for MCC funding. Since inception in 2004, the MCC has worked with qualifying, well-governed but poor countries, supporting them with long-term (up to 5-year funding) compacts that apply

With all the excitement going on this week at the UN Meetings, the launch of the Open Government Partnership, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the World Bank–IMF Annual Meetings, you may have missed that this week is the one year anniversary since President Obama released the first ever Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) on Global Development!

Speaking to a room of heads of states and ministers on Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her platform as chair of the OECD Ministerial Meetings to place a special spotlight on development. In her speech, Clinton described how the OECD can foster a new partnership between donors and developing countries, which relies

With US aid to Pakistan currently under intense scrutiny, and budget cuts threatening to limit resources, the opportunity is ripe for discussions on improving US foreign assistance and maximizing the impact of development dollars. Enter last week’s launch of the first Congressional Caucus for Effective Foreign Assistance in the House of Representatives. Reps. Ander Crenshaw