In July and August 2013 the Development Policy Centre surveyed 356 stakeholders in the Australian aid program, from the senior executives of Australia’s biggest NGOs and development contracting companies, to the officials of multilateral, partner government and Australian government agencies. The survey asked them what they thought about the Australian aid program, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they thought the future of aid was and what needed to be done to improve our aid.

The final report of the survey was released on 12 December 2013.

In full
» Benchmarking Australian aid: results from the 2013 Australian aid stakeholder survey (PDF, 1.92 MB)

In sections
» One page summary (PDF, 289 KB)
» Executive summary (PDF, 638 KB)
» Report (PDF, 1.11 MB)
» Annex (including statistical tables and questionnaire) (PDF, 1.6 MB)

Report launch presentation
» Presentation (PDF, 880 KB)
» Listen to podcast

Blog posts
» 2013 Australian aid stakeholder survey. Part 1: the good news by Stephen Howes and Jonathan Pryke
» 2013 Australian aid stakeholder survey. Part 2: and now the bad news by Stephen Howes and Jonathan Pryke

Background

In 2013, the Development Policy Centre ran the first Australian aid stakeholder survey. This was a new instrument (new for Australia and possibly internationally) we trialled to obtain feedback on the effectiveness of the Australian aid program, and suggestions for improvement. The survey was essentially a type of crowd-sourcing, where the crowd in this case are stakeholders in the Australian aid program. We undertook the survey because we believe that collating the views of the sector in a systematic way would be a worthwhile and constructive exercise.

The survey covered views on: aid volumes, the aid program in general and that part of aid program with which the respondent is engaged. It was conducted online under a guarantee of anonymity and was run in two phases.

The first phase was launched on June 17th, and was a closed survey targeting pre-identified members of the development contractor and Australian NGO communities, who were targeted because they are the only two sectors where we can hope to pre-identify a representative sample. We targeted all major development contractors and Australian development NGOs which receive funding from the aid program and a sample of smaller NGOs. Participants were selected based on seniority in their organisation and amount of direct engagement with the Australian aid program.

The second phase was launched on July 15th, and was a public survey in which all other interested stakeholders were invited to participate. The questionnaire was the same as in phase one.

The stakeholder survey closed in August 2013. The results of the survey were released via our website, blog and events including a launch presentation at the 2014 Australasian Aid Conference.

Read our accompanying blog for more detail on what we aimed to achieve with the survey.

View the survey questionnaire [pdf].

For more information please contact Devpol.