USAID’s Global Development Alliance (GDA) business model breaks the traditional development assistance mold, and sets forth a new way of doing business. GDAs are cultivated with the philosophy that social and economic conditions in poor and transitional countries are improved in more effective and sustainable ways when public and private sectors work in collaboration. Since its creation in 2001, the GDA has time and again obtained anecdotal evidence of the effectiveness of its alliances, however, evaluation methods which were created to measure conventional approaches to development, may not adequately measure the development outcomes of public-private partnerships.

The GDA has contracted with DAI to initiate a formal evaluation of its alliances. The purpose of the evaluation was to help GDA refine its strategy and workplans, develop new tools and training for alliance implementations, and design new mechanisms to help missions build more alliances with improved scale and impact. Findings were shared with USAID practitioners at both the mission and headquarters level as well as to GDA partners, thought leaders, experts, and potential new alliance partners.

The evaluation team pushed GDA beyond the anecdotal to examine the critical factors of alliance effectiveness in advancing development. The team developed an analytic framework to derive typologies for categorizing alliances, developed metrics for determining impact, and identified best practices for facilitating future alliance building. Once the methodology and framework were in place, the team then evaluated a sample selected across the more than 500 GDAs undertaken to date. The objectives include analyzing the impact and effectiveness of projects, decision-making criteria, management procedures, monitoring, feedback mechanisms, and communications and support between the missions and headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Other objectives of the evaluation were to indicate if GDAs met the expected alliance goals or if there were unexpected outcomes, to analyze the sustainability of the outcomes and the value alliance partners attributed to the collaboration, and to outline the motivations of the private sector partners. To most accurately gauge the success of an alliance, the team took into account the perspective of multiple players including the private sector, foundations, international and local nongovernmental organizations, and various civil society actors.