Comparable Aid Effectiveness Ratings

Aidrating.org strives to contribute to better aid by measuring effectiveness/impact of interventions and making them comparable. In order to achieve this, they support full project related transparency by donors and contracting agencies. 

The measurement is standardized and expressed quantitatively on an absolute scale. This allows full comparison at all levels: Between donors, projects, project types, etc. The concept focuses on project relevant information which can be aggregated to provide a full overview. It has been tested with Swiss agencies, but can be applied to any donor, project or implementing agency. 

See the 10 Questions to Analyze Any Development Project here. 

A “universal evaluation standard” should have the in-built capability of allowing to adapt to future improvements and developments without having to greatly modify or drop older experiences for lack of compatibility. This is best done if the criteria are broad enough to accommodate new findings within them rather than having to add new ones. The criteria list, once again, is therefore essential and will necessarily have to be wide. 

It seems a daunting task to find and define a standard which satisfies all these requirements. AidRating professionals think that it is a worthwhile effort to try and see whether this is possible, and how such requirements could be met in practice. Because of this, they have attempted to design an evaluation framework which is capable to fulfill all these requirements. They report that they have found one and present it for discussion and possible further development. 

This is an abridged version of a longer article. It can be found under ”Universal Evaluation Standard” at this link.