The UK government’s new Evaluation Registry has attracted attention from the development sector, who are naturally concerned that evaluation will be an early casualty of a reduced aid budget.
The Registry lists 204 evaluations commissioned by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and its predecessor, the Department for International Development (DFID). CGD’s Lee Crawford calculates that this makes UK aid ten times more evaluated, pound for pound, than other government spending. This is not particularly surprising given that, as the Evaluation Task Force points out, aside from a few ‘pockets’ of high-quality evaluation practice, much UK government spending is not evaluated at all.
UK aid is also probably the most transparent area of UK government expenditure. On FCDO’s DevTracker website, you can search UK aid projects by country, sector or delivery channel, and find business cases, results frameworks, lists of partners, payment data, baseline studies and annual monitoring reports. It takes effort and expertise to make sense of it, but there is certainly plenty of data and evidence on UK aid and its impact.
There’s a good reason for the additional investment in scrutiny. For domestic spending programmes, multiple feedback loops inform policy makers whether their programmes are working, including public consultations, lobbying by NGOs and the private sector, and of course the democratic process. But the intended beneficiaries of aid programmes are outside our political community. We therefore need additional investment in monitoring and evaluation to ensure the expenditure is worthwhile.
This rationale is reflected in both US legislation (Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act 2016), which requires systematic monitoring, evaluation and reporting on US aid spending, and in the UK’s International Development (ODA Target) Act 2025, which requires independent evaluation of whether UK aid represents value for money – a function delivered by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI).
However, while UK aid rates well for evaluation and transparency, the UK government is not so good at telling a larger story about the goals and accomplishments of its aid.
International development strategies are produced from time to time, but date quickly with changes in governments and ministers. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy (March 2021), then the May 2022 international development strategy, a ‘refresh’ to the integrated review (March 2023), and then a white paper on international development in November 2023. The current government appointed former DFID permanent secretary Minouche Shafik to review the UK’s approach to international development, but this seems to have been overtaken by a new planning process for the ‘glidepath’ to 0.3%.
There is no time period associated with these strategies, and old ones are never explicitly cancelled, leaving the reader guessing as to which are still salient. The rapid succession of strategies has created a set of competing narratives – poverty reduction, mutual prosperity, global security, strategic competition with China – that have muddied the waters in communicating the purpose of UK aid.
FCDO does not systematically produce sector or thematic strategies. There are a few – for example, on international women and girls, health system strengthening and international climate finance – but coverage is ad hoc. There is no single repository of strategies, and no clear hierarchy or link back to the overall aid strategy.
Similarly, the UK does not have a system for capturing the aggregate results of its development assistance. Back when UK aid was scaling up towards 0.7%, the government set itself global targets, such as numbers of children vaccinated, or girls supported in education. These ‘reach’ targets were somewhat controversial, with the potential to distort programming choices, and have largely slipped out of use. However, they helped convey a sense of the scale of UK aid programming.
FCDO does not publish an annual results report, either globally or for particular countries or regions. UK international climate finance stands out as an area that reports against a set of portfolio-level KPIs, but there is no equivalent for other sectors or thematic areas. The UK also makes no attempt to track its contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Interestingly, when the UK is funding a multilateral organisation or an NGO, it expects it to have a clear global strategy and results framework, results-based budgeting and a system for monitoring and reporting on its global results – see, for example, the MOPAN assessment framework for multilateral organisations. But it doesn’t try to meet those standards for the UK aid programme.
As a result, we have a lot of granular information about individual aid projects, but much less about what they all add up to. If you are interested in the larger questions – what is UK aid for, is it guided by credible strategies, and what are the overall results? – the best place to go is ICAI’s repository of reviews looking at UK aid by sector, theme or geographical area.
As the aid sector grapples with this existential crisis, this gap in the results architecture for UK aid may prove important. The recent aid cuts were not motivated by scepticism about whether aid works. They had completely different motivations – the urgency of replacing the US security umbrella or, on the other side of the Atlantic, a wholesale rejection of liberal internationalism. You can’t use evidence to change a view that wasn’t informed by evidence in the first place. But if we are going to fight to retain public support, we need a coherent story about what UK aid is for and what it is accomplishing.
Agulhas Applied Knowledge leads the consortium that supports the UK’s Independent Commission on Aid Impact, and is also a service provider for MOPAN.
The views expressed are Agulhas’ own and should not be taken to reflect those of our clients.
