Foreign aid critics, supporters, recipients and donors have produced eloquent rhetoric on
the need for better aid practices – has this translated into reality? This paper attempts to monitor the best and worst of aid practices among bilateral, multilateral, and UN agencies. We create aid practice measures based on aid transparency, specialization, selectivity, ineffective aid channels and overhead costs. We rate donor agencies from best to worst on aid practices. We find that the UK does well among bilateral agencies, the US is below average, and Scandinavian donors do surprisingly poorly . . . 

Over the past decade, HIV programs have been successfully scaled up in many developing countries, leading some to wonder how the investments made into HIV infrastructure could be leveraged to deliver additional health services. Although the concept is appealing from many perspectives, integrating additional health services into existing vertical HIV infrastructure may not mitigate some of the challenges these programs have introduced in implementing countries . . . 
Karen Grepin

Private international finance for individual and small business recipients seeking to improve development outcomes is particularly in vogue, and a bewildering variety of intermediaries have emerged to channel the growing capital flows. Some of these intermediaries work much like conventional charities, collecting and transmitting private donations for private recipients advancing development—defined to include both private sector growth and institutional reform . . .

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach (West saves Africa) to occasional swings to a "marginal" approach (West takes one small step at a time to help individual Africans). Evaluation of "one step at a time" initiatives is generally easier than that of transformational ones either through controlled experiments (although these have been much oversold) or simple case studies where it is easier to attribute outcomes to actions. We see two themes emerge from the literature survey: (1) escalation. As each successive Western transformational effort has yielded disappointing results, the response has been to try an even more ambitious effort. (2) the cycle of ideas. Rather than a progressive testing and discarding of failed ideas, we see a cycle in aid ideas in many areas in Africa . . . 
William Easterly

Foreign aid from official sources to developing countries (excluding private aid) amounted to $103.6 billion in 2006 and has amounted to over $2.3 trillion (measured in 2006 dollars) over the past 50 years. There have been fierce debates over how effective this aid has been or could be in the future (for example, Sachs, 2005; Easterly, 2006). However, this paper does not address the already ubiquitous issue of aid effectiveness—that is, the extent to which foreign aid dollars actually achieve their goals of reducing poverty, malnutrition, disease, and death. Instead, this paper focuses on “best practices” in the way in which official aid is given, which is an important component of the wider debate . . . 
William Easterly and Tobias Pfutze

Those involved in the millennium development goal (MDG) campaign routinely state ‘‘Africa will miss all the MDGs.” This paper argues that a series of arbitrary choices made in defining ‘‘success” or ‘‘failure” as achieving numerical targets for the MDGs made attainment of the MDGs less likely in Africa than in other regions even when its progress was in line with or above historical or contemporary experience of other regions. The statement that ‘‘Africa will miss all the MDGs” thus has the unfortunate effect of making African successes look like failures.
William Easterly

The record of the aid agencies over time seems to indicate weak evidence of progress over time in response to learning from experience, new knowledge, or changes in political
climate. The few positive results are an increased sensitivity to per capita income of the recipient (although it happened long ago) a decline in the share of food aid, and a decline in aid tying. Most of the other evidence -- increasing donor fragmentation, unchanged emphasis on technical assistance, little or no sign of increased selectivity with respect to policies and institutions, the adjustment lending-debt relief imbroglio -- suggests an unchanged status quo, lack of response to new knowledge, and repetition of past mistakes.
William Easterly