How UK aid learns
Departments with new aid budgets are increasingly developing their understanding of how to use aid effectively - but more should be done to integrate learning into international development spending across government to ensure value for money.
Our approach
We set out to understand how well aid spending departments learn in order to deliver aid effectively and provide value for money. The focus was on learning in the delivery management cycle by all ODA-spending departments including cross-government funds. The Department for International Development (DFID) was in scope but only in relation to cross-government learning. The review explores the extent to which other departments learn from DFID and vice-versa.
As ODA spending by departments other than DFID is in many cases still relatively new, and aspects of this topic have been covered in recent or ongoing ICAI reviews (for example, the Prosperity Fund, CSSF, Global Health Threats, GCRF, Newton Fund and International Climate Finance), we chose to conduct a rapid review on this topic. It builds on ICAI’s 2014 review ‘How DFID learns’ and relevant findings from other subsequent ICAI reviews which featured questions on learning, testing the hypothesis that every department has something unique to offer to effective learning of what works in ODA. did not aim to cover DFID or other departments in the same depth.
The review also includes DFID’s role in supporting other government departments with learning, and the adequacy and effectiveness of cross-government learning and coordination mechanisms. It covers the period since the 2015 UK aid strategy (2016-17 to 2018-19).
Review questions
- Relevance: To what extent do aid-spending government departments (apart from DFID) have systems and processes, resources and incentives in place to enable effective learning about their spending of ODA?
- To what extent is DFID supporting other government departments to learn? And vice versa?
- Effectiveness: How effectively is learning shared across aid-spending departments and used to improve the effectiveness and value-for-money of aid?
- How effectively is learning being used to improve the design and delivery of aid programmes?
- How well do government departments learn from and share learning with DFID?
Given the rapid timeline this review did not involve in-country fieldwork, although it did look at learning in-country. A combination of methodologies were used to answer the review questions, including a review of the recent literature on organisational learning (below), a collection and analysis of documents prepared by aid-spending departments, and key informant interviews.