Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned

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John CusterDeputy Director of Analytics and Communications

Bryan BurgessSenior Policy Specialist

Bradley C. ParksExecutive Director

Before reimagining development data, remember what we’ve learned<br>Why we’re publishing a free, searchable, and ungated archive featuring a quarter-century of USAID evaluation reports.<br>July 31, 2026<br>John Custer, Bryan Burgess, Brad Parks, and Ketevan Gallager

USAID Administrator Samantha Power tours a World Food Program (WFP) warehouse in Amman, Jordan, used to consolidate and prepare humanitarian assistance supplies for onward shipment to Gaza. Photo by USAID via Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) shut its doors a year ago. Among the assets at risk: a quarter-century of evaluation reports documenting what worked, what didn't, and why from USAID's Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC). We've archived the entire corpus of knowledge, which consists of ~4,500 English-language performance and impact evaluations published between 2000 and 2023. They're free, ungated, and searchable at USAID-archive.aiddata.org.<br>This blog is the first in a two-part series on endangered data resources. With this piece, we detail AidData’s collaborations to save a key archive at risk of disappearance. In Part 2, we will explore findings from AidData’s recently-published Data Asset Inventory, which examines resources that are at risk of meeting the same fate as the USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse.<br>What’s in the USAID archive<br>The archive contains a curated set of USAID evaluation reports, capturing decades of evidence on foreign aid programs. They include performance evaluations that measure the extent to which USAID programs generated their expected outputs, as well as impact evaluations that provide evidence of the net, attributable impacts of USAID programs between 2000 and 2023.<br>USAID was a leader in evidence-based decision-making, accountability, and organizational learning. For decades, it commissioned program evaluations and maintained a documentation repository, but for most of its history its internal evaluation culture tended to emphasize compliance over learning. Then, in 2011, the agency adopted a new Evaluation Policy designed to improve both the quantity and quality of evaluations through a more demanding and explicit set of requirements. The policy required that evaluations be built into program and project design from the outset, rather than added at the end of implementation, and it emphasized answering strategic questions about program impacts. It also required USAID operating units to systematically plan evaluations and ensure they were adequately resourced and methodologically rigorous. While it did not mandate a fixed share of program budgets for evaluation, it effectively normalized evaluation as a standard cost of development programming and reinforced a broader shift toward an organizational culture of learning. It required that the largest programs, along with those that were testing new approaches, be subject to thorough evaluation. The policy also strengthened transparency expectations by requiring that evaluation findings be documented, disseminated, and made publicly available, enabling both internal and external stakeholders to learn from results.<br>Although open data is a public good, USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse (the DEC) was not very user-friendly. It was called a pdf graveyard, the kind of data graveyard that AidData said you should avoid. But it was openly accessible, which meant that someone somewhere was probably using it as training data for an AI algorithm.<br>How it came to be<br>One of the people using the DEC to train an algorithm was a high-school student named Ketevan Gallagher, who is now studying at University of Toronto. As a part of her senior research project, Ketevan collected over 4,000 pdfs of evaluations from the DEC for use in a machine learning project.<br>After the DEC went offline, Ketevan reached out to AidData to see if we could archive her work. When we sifted through the data that Ketevan had cleaned and structured, we saw an opportunity to provide a unique solution for those searching for lessons learned from evaluations of U.S. foreign assistance programs.<br>There are other efforts underway to derive insights from the broader corpus of DEC documentation—including a smorgasbord of training manuals, handbooks, literature reviews, workshop and conference summaries, strategy documents, policy papers, feasibility studies, engineering designs, social and environmental assessments, political economy analyses, contractor deliverables, audits, and compliance...