The new, improved, Commitment to Development Index (CDI) was launched in 2020 following a review process to evaluate how well the measures, indicators, and other key components of the Index reflect our changing reality, and to ensure the metric remains, as a senior USAID official described it in the past, “a key metric.”
The CDI now covers all countries in the G20, and has added new measures of policies around development finance and global health as well as issues such as climate change, gender equality and migration which are now front of mind for many of the world’s largest economies. The measure, which regularly receives widespread media coverage, enhances the public scrutiny of development policy, and has been used by a number of Governments to evaluate their performance as a development player. Officials in the governments of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US have confirmed that they track the CDI closely when it is released each year. Finland uses the CDI’s trade component as one of the indicators in the monitoring criteria for its global responsibility and coherence, while New Zealand uses the Index as one of its KPIs to report to the Parliament. Norway officials noted CDI’s impact in the country’s foreign policy, including the formalisation of a mechanism to address policy coherence. The CDI assessment of whether countries were members of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has led Luxembourg to pursue joining it in 2020. The CDI assessment of whether countries were members of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has led Luxembourg to pursue joining it in 2020. And the UAE, recently added to the list of countries ranked by the CDI, has included the Index in the list of reports monitored by its Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre.
Internationally, the measure is used in OECD Development Assistance Committee peer reviews and in 2021, the European Parliamentary Research Service included the CDI in its list of “Ten composite indices for policy-making."
