Official development assistance (ODA) has been the standard measure of foreign aid for 45 years, but its creation was largely accidental, and followed no plan. Its origins lie with efforts by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the early 60s to soften and harmonise the terms...

The grant element is the “gift portion” of a financial transaction. The mathematical technique for arriving at a precise grant element percentage was first proposed by John Pincus of the RAND Corporation in 1963, and developed mathematically by Göran Ohlin of the Development Centre in 1966....

The definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA) has for 40 years been the global standard for measuring donor efforts in supporting development co-operation objectives. It has provided the yardstick for documenting the volume and the terms of the concessional resources provided,...