Morning Briefing

"[A] new and complementary agreement between Liberia and USAID, called the Fixed Amount Reimbursement Agreement (FARA)," is "quite revolutionary," Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy and a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), and Jacob Hughes, write in CGD's "Global Health Policy" blog. They note a recent working paper they authored with Walter Gwenigale in which they "describe Liberia's unique experience in pooling donor funds for health in a post-conflict setting, with good results." They ask why USAID did not make payments directly into the Health Sector Pool Fund mechanism, stating, "The FARA contribution to the pool could have created complementary, virtuous incentives to achieve the pool fund results as efficiently as possible, which would be a credit to the government and all the participating donors, and would set a precedent for USAID to participate in pooling in other countries" (5/11).