The Independent Commission on Aid Impact (ICAI) was established in May 2011 with a strategic aim to provide independent scrutiny of UK aid spending, to promote the delivery of value for money for British taxpayers and the maximisation of the impact of aid. ICAI reports directly to Parliament through the International Development Committee, which established a sub-Committee on the work of ICAI in October 2012. This has worked well, and has helped foster closer working arrangements that promote the sharing of ideas between IDC inquires and the evaluations that ICAI undertakes. ICAI's Annual Report 2012-13 was generally well-received, as was the Commission's overall performance over the past year. The Annual Report published ICAI's budget for the first time and another excellent innovation was a section following up recommendations made in ICAI's Year 1 reports. ICAI should include a more detailed assessment of the impact of UK aid, including overarching lessons for DFID and should do more to promote lesson-learning across evaluations. This could be done by seminars and outreach events following each evaluation, which would help improve knowledge dissemination, both to DFID and the wider development community. A clear message this year was that DFID must think more strategically about its management of large contracts, especially those with multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organisations and contractors. This seems a fundamental criticism of the Department given the significance of these relationships. DFID should pay closer attention to how it selects external agencies as implementing bodies, and how much it pays for their services.

Government response to HC 566, session 2013-14 (ISBN 9780215062840)

The Independent Commission on Aid Impact (ICAI) is an independent commission which reports to the House of Commons International Development Committee, not to the Department for International Development (DFID). The Committee ensures its accountability to Parliament in two main ways: through a sub-Committee, which takes evidence on the reports published by ICAI; and through an inquiry each year carried out by the full Committee into ICAI's Annual Report. 2013-14 has been a busy year for ICAI, with 12 reports published on a wide range of DFID's activities. ICAI's Annual Report contained three headline findings for DFID this year. Firstly, tighter management of multilateral partners is needed. Secondly, DFID needs to continue to improve its aid programme management capacity, especially where contractors are implementing programmes. Thirdly, DFID's corporate results agenda - and in particular its use of 'reach indicators' - is distorting programming choices. The Committee shares ICAI's concerns on these issues and intend to follow up its recommendations in two forthcoming inquiries this autumn: Beyond Aid; and DFID's Departmental Annual Report 2013-14. DFID spends a large amount of money - at least £200 million - on self-evaluation. However, it cannot provide an exact total. The Committee question this large expenditure, especially given that an ICAI evaluation recently found that DFID staff struggle to use self-evaluation material in their work. The contracts of the current ICAI commissioners, contractor consortium and staff all end in May 2015. While staff contracts may be renewed, new commissioners and contractors must be recruited. Planning is underway for the transition to the next phase of ICAI: all possible efforts must be made to ensure this goes as smoothly as possible.

The Chief Commissioner of ICAI has a crucial role in scrutinising aid spending by the UK Government and reporting to Parliament through the International Development Committee. The Committee are pleased to endorse the appointment of Dr Alison Evans to this post, but recommend that at least one of the existing Commissioners be reappointed for a further term to ensure continuity, and that one of the Commissioners be an audit professional. The selection process used resulted in an unranked list of four candidates deemed "appointable" being presented to the Secretary of State for consideration. This puts too much power in the hands of the Secretary of State for an independent scrutiny post and threatens to undermine the candidate in the eyes of the public who may assume that the candidate most sympathetic to DFID was chosen. The Committee recommend that panels for ICAI Commissioner appointments should be invited to rank candidates or otherwise advise the Secretary of State as they see fit. In the longer term, it is recommended that the Committee be able to choose the Chief Commissioner from the list of candidates.

The Ebola outbreak that has stricken Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea since March 2014 has had a devastating effect on the region. By 2 December 2014, more than 17,500 cases and 6,000 deaths had been reported. Ebola has had wider damaging consequences for local economies, food security, institutional stability and the broader health system. The House of Commons International Development Committee says DfID and the World Health Organisation initially failed to recognise the scale and severity of the Ebola crisis and were too slow to respond. This is in part due the WHO's member states, who have cut its funding and failed to emphasise building sustainable health systems in developing countries, leaving the global health system "dangerously inadequate" for responding to health emergencies. It recommends that DfID press for a review of the international approach to health emergencies, incorporating the function, structure and funding of the World Health Organisation and the role and expectations of major donors.

The number of low income countries is falling. At the same time, the importance of global issues - conflict, climate, migration, trade, tax, financial stability, youth unemployment, urbanisation economic development, and infectious disease - is rising. The Committee argues that aid remains vital for addressing poverty in poor countries, for encouraging economic development, for providing global goods such as tackling climate change, combating diseases such as Ebola and providing humanitarian assistance, but new forms of co-operation have to be developed in order to meet these challenges. This will include new financial mechanisms and facilitating links with UK institutions in a wide range of areas, including health, education, culture, law, culture and science. This will require the Department for International Development (DFID) to put more emphasis on working with small organisations and less on programme management.As the focus moves away from aid, policy coherence for development must be at the heart of a new approach. This means working across Government in the UK, and with global partners in the multilateral system, to maximise the impact on development of all the UK's actions. This approach and changes will require DFID staff to develop different skills.

Sierra Leone and Liberia have made remarkable recoveries since their civil wars. Ban Ki Moon was in Freetown this month to bring an end to the UN Security mission and set the UN presence on a conventional development footing from 1st April 2014. In Liberia there has been a gradual drawdown of the peacekeeping mission which will approximately halve the UN military presence by 2015. However both countries remain fragile with high unemployment and concerns about corruption. The devastating Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia demonstrates the dangers of ignoring the least developed countries in the world. The weak state of the health system in both countries has greatly reduced the effectiveness of the response to Ebola. There is an alarming lack of capacity in the health system, including a shortage of skilled clinicians.The Committee have determined that the scale of the Ebola crisis now unfolding in Sierra Leone and Liberia, may well be connected to declining levels of international support for health system improvements in what remain two of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.

Summarizes the science of climate change and impacts on the United States, for the public and policymakers.

Extreme weather and climate events, interacting with exposed and vulnerable human and natural systems, can lead to disasters. This Special Report explores the social as well as physical dimensions of weather- and climate-related disasters, considering opportunities for managing risks at local to international scales. SREX was approved and accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 18 November 2011 in Kampala, Uganda.

The study edition of book the Los Angeles Times called, "The most extensive review of U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics in generations." This is the complete Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention programs -- a.k.a., The Torture Report. Based on over six million pages of secret CIA documents, the report details a covert program of secret prisons, prisoner deaths, interrogation practices, and cooperation with other foreign and domestic agencies, as well as the CIA's efforts to hide the details of the program from the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the American people. Over five years in the making, it is presented here exactly as redacted and released by the United States government on December 9, 2014, with an introduction by Daniel J. Jones, who led the Senate investigation. This special edition includes: • Large, easy-to-read format. • Almost 3,000 notes formatted as footnotes, exactly as they appeared in the original report. This allows readers to see obscured or clarifying details as they read the main text. • An introduction by Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones who led the investigation and wrote the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a forward by the head of that committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein.