

In the three years since Congress passed the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2016 (FATAA), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has made great strides in implementing the law's provisions. The Act created guidelines related to monitoring and evaluation for U.S. Departments and Agencies that invest foreign-assistance resources, and required them to publish quarterly financial and descriptive data on their programs, to create transparency on where they are directing funds and if programs are meeting their goals. USAID was instrumental in providing input into the draft legislation that became the FATAA, and already had in place many of the requirements included in the enacted law.

Since 2016, USAID has updated our Evaluation Policy to be FATAA-compliant, continued to commission a high number of evaluations (189 in 2018 alone), and strengthened our requirements for our staff to improve their use of evaluation findings, including by tracking their use in our Evaluation Registry. Access to evaluation reports has also improved. In 2019, USAID formalized an Agency-wide Self-Reliance Learning Agenda, which prioritizes key questions for us to answer through evaluation and other learning activities.

In a report issued in July 2019, the Government Accountability Office found USAID to be fully compliant with the Guidelines for Monitoring and Evaluation issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Indeed, the Agency's policies and practices for monitoring, evaluation, and learning not only comply with the requirements of the FATAA, but go beyond them.

USAID is also a leader among Federal Departments and Agencies in transparency. Of the 22 Departments and Agencies subject to the FATAA, USAID is one of only three shown to be compliant with all of OMB's FATAA indicators for the transparency of data, as outlined in the Report to Congress on Implementation of The Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act. USAID's transparency practices go beyond the FATAA's requirements, and the Agency continues to release better data and new data fields- such as sub-national geographic information and activity objectives- and is working to provide more data on results.

USAID continues to advance our transparency efforts by improving the quality of available data; increasing our use of these data; and working toward the development and adoption of the new Development Information Solution (DIS), an enterprise-wide system for the collection, storage, and sharing of data.