Measuring results: The tension between tracking funds and tracking impact

In March 2005, the U.S. along with over 100 developing countries and donor institutions endorsed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the U.S. Government as a whole strongly supports its implementation. The Paris Declaration encourages locally-developed action plans and coordinating processes based on broader consultation with stakeholders and franker developing country-donor partnership, with a view to improving aid effectiveness and achieving better development results.

The U.S. supports all 54 commitments in the declaration.

The U.S. strongly endorses the principle of mutual accountability which is reflected in the increasing emphasis on monitoring and evaluation of health programs funded by the USG and the results thereof.

The presentation will discuss the approaches that the USG has taken to implementing the principle of accountability in its foreign assistance programming. This will include an examination of the variety of levels of indicators and analyses that are used by the USG for health programming, ranging from measurements of the immediate outputs of funds provided to changes in health status which result from USG inputs combined with those from other sources, such as the host country, other bilateral and multilateral donors, and NGOs both domestic and international.