Thread by @rglenner

Its been 1yr since I joined @DFID_UK. Its been fascinating, inspiring and fun! I've visited our Kenya, Somalia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, India, DC, and Jordan offices and learned a lot.

Several lessons stand out: on influence, scale, complexity & use of evidence. Thread.

1. Helping countries spend their own money more effectively can be a great use of aid. Most spending on poverty relief is by LICs and MICs themselves but much is inefficiently spent. Aid can help pay for evidence generation, help tailor evidence to local needs and provide advice.

2. More work is needed to turn rigorous evidence into good policy design. Policy makers need to engage actively with evidence to adapt it to their local context. Academics need to do more to draw out general policy implications across multiple studies.
ssir.org/articles/entry…

3. Development is not good scale. The incentive is to have beautiful projects that reach a few rather than a smaller impact on millions b/c concentrated success is more visible and easier to measure. But unit costs decline with scale (see work of @theIRC & @caitlin_tulloch).

4. We often try to do too much in one program. Development challenges may have multiple drivers but that does not mean programs should have multiple elements. Complex programs are hard to run & are the enemies of scale. Only worth it when there is evidence of complementarity.

5. We should judge our success on a portfolio basis. Not every project will be a success. Development means working in difficult places tackling intransigent issues. The wins when they come can be very big and a few big wins can pay for many less successful projects.

6. Great>>good. Instead of asking what works, we need to ask what works best? The best interventions can be x100 more cost-effective than a good program. There are big payoffs in moving from good to great and from doing great progs at scale (where they address local need, see 2).

Many thanks to all the @DFID_UK staff and partners who have made this last year so rewarding. I have learned a lot from you and am excited for another year working to bring the UK's expertise and resources to help improve the lives of the world's poorest. Happy new year!