Client: USAID In the past two years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has seen its lending model and budget upended, not by a civil war in a failed state, but by a permanent member of the UN Security Council’s attempt to conquer its smaller neighbor in the heart of Europe. The extreme global disruption caused by the Russian invasion has necessitated a fundamental rethinking of USAID’s lending strategy. Russia’s invasion has had repercussions for USAID’s traditional aid recipients in the developing world due to spikes in food and energy prices. Going forward, USAID must make a number of difficult decisions in how to allocate scarce resources. Specifically, the agency must ensure that its lending, at minimum, does not undermine institutional integrity or facilitate corruption. In the case of Ukraine’s reconstruction, the perception of transparency is paramount for maintaining a strong coalition of willing international donors. One promising strategy calls for directing resources to local and regional recipients as opposed to the central government. Ideally, the localization of aid can help to sidestep the problem of excess fiscal centralization and can give actors with local knowledge a greater say in how aid is allocated. Nevertheless, the localization of aid brings its own unique challenges. Local governments tend to have a lower level of administrative competency, which can facilitate misallocation of resources. Furthermore, when USAID must negotiate with numerous local or regional governments, this often necessitates an understanding of local cultural and political framings that may be poorly understood by USAID officials who are used to dealing with central administrators in the capital city. The goals of this PRP will be to examine emerging best practices in tracking and assessing aid transparency and equity. The students will examine and quantify the costs and benefits of alternative aid delivery and monitoring strategies, including the continuance of a centralized distribution model, direct provision to regional actors, and delivery through intermediaries such as NGOs or diaspora-led organizations. This will be performed primarily through case study analysis of existing practice and assessment of technological tools that may enable more effective monitoring in the future. While the project will be examined primarily through the lens of Ukraine’s reconstruction, it will have implications for other post-war or post-disaster reconstruction plans. By the end of the PRP, the students will develop a thorough set of context-specific recommendations that will assist USAID’s decision-making process for allocating funds for the reconstruction of Ukraine and other analogous future scenarios.