New GAO Report on Democratic Assistance

A newly released GAO report concludes that U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Labor and Human Rights (State DRL) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) must increase information-sharing and improve coordination in order to efficiently pursue the “important objective” of democracy promotion.

The report seeks to accomplish three goals. First, it depicts democracy assistance funding from USAID, State DRL and the NED. The report finds $2.25 billion in democracy assistance was given in FY2008. Taking a sample of 10 representative countries, the average country received the vast majority of their annual assistance from USAID, with the average USAID project costing $2 million.  In addition, the report breaks down Governing Justly and Democratically (GJD) aid in FY2008 by subset, with Good Governance (34%) receiving the most, Political Competition and Consensus (13%) receiving the least, and the Rule of Law and Human Rights (27%) and Civil Society (26%) in the middle.

Second, the report examines the efforts of USAID, DRL and NED to coordinate their democracy assistance programs. It finds that while USAID and DRL have improved their ability to share information and collaborate their efforts, they are often unaware of NED’s projects. Furthermore, geographical distance and a lack of resources hinders cooperation between country-based USAID and Washington-centric DRL.

Third, the report investigates the current ability of USAID to evaluate democratic assistance effectiveness. Currently, the USAID implements custom and standard indicators to evaluate short-term results of assistance. Occasionally, USAID also conducts longer-term program impact reports. Such reports have become more infrequent due to resource constraints and the difficulty of measuring democratic progress. The report also describes USAID’s recent strides toward following the recommendations of a 2008 National Research Council study of democracy evaluation capacity, including the launch of a pilot program evaluating the effects of democratic assistance programs.

The report includes several interesting data sets, including levels of USAID, DRL and NED funding per country, breakdowns of the GJD subsets per country, Freedom House ratings and levels of GJD assistance per country. In addition, the appendices include brief information about assistance sources excluded from the main report, such as MEPI and MCC, and comments from the relevant parties.