Multilateral resource allocation: best practice approaches

Government donors provide billions of dollars in development assistance via multilateral organisations (MOs) each year. But what would best practice in donor allocation of resources to MOs look like? And what are the principles and options for a manageable and auditable allocation system? An ODI study for the UK Department for International Development (DFID), completed in 2009, reviewed current best practice and made proposals for improvement/refinement. This Project Briefing reviews the key findings and recommendations from the final report on that study (Highton et al., 2009), which proposes a structured approach to gather and use all relevant evidence to facilitate informed decisions on resource allocation.