ICAI follow-up review of 2016-17 reports

Outstanding issues

We identified four areas of strategic significance during the 2016-17 follow-up that merited further follow-up the next year, either because the response had
fallen short of what we expected or because government actions were only at the planning stage during our follow-up exercise:

• Transitioning from traditional aid relationships: We assessed DFID’s progress on putting in place key principles for managing its changing relationships with partner governments and civil society organisations in middle-income countries as they ‘graduate’ from conventional bilateral or financial aid.
• Prosperity Fund: We explored the Fund’s progress with (i) developing portfolio-level results indicators and associated systems for measuring results and learning from experience; and (ii) implementing its new procurement framework. We also assessed whether the newly merged governance arrangements of the Prosperity Fund and the CSSF include explicit and challenging procedures to assess the ODA eligibility of programmes proposed for funding.
• Irregular migration: We assessed (i) progress on identifying and managing the risks of harm to vulnerable migrants in the UK’s migration-related programming; and (ii) the monitoring and evaluation arrangements for DFID’s new flagship programme, the Safety, Support and Solutions programme for Refugees and Migrants.
• Inclusive growth: We assessed the progress that DFID had made on refining its approach to inclusion in economic development programming, at both the country portfolio and individual programme levels.

Updates on these outstanding issues were published in our 2017-18 follow-up review.