Nancy Birdsall, the Center for Global Development’s (CGD) founding president and one of our CSV advisory board members, has been updating us with news of the organisation’s work so far this year.
Writing in the second quarter issue of CGD Partners Council newsletter The Partnership, Nancy recounts a busy few months that have included playing host to the Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan at a policy breakfast and public speech, the release of three essays ahead of a new book by CGD Senior Fellow Mead Over on the use of performance incentives to bring down HIV infections, and stepping up work on the CGD’s Cash on Delivery Aid theory.
The latter is an interesting proposal that suggests foreign aid payments should be made on the basis of a shared, measurable outcome to which governments and donors are committed to making progress. However within this framework, the recipients are free to spend funding as and where they see fit, focusing on what Nancy describes as ‘what they need to do to make progress rather than spending time documenting expenditures or guessing which strategies are most likely to please their funders’.
While at Nestlé, we prefer to offer people free technical assistance – such as training Colombian farmers in better water management practices as part of our Silvopasture programme - or microfinance for specific projects be paid back over time, I think both approaches share the same vision.
By agreeing on a measurable outcome but placing responsibility and decision-making about the specific use of funds in the hands of the recipient, they are based on the simple idea of cutting out the middle-man to create shared value between two mutually benefiting parties.
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