Listening to Leaders 2021: A report card for development partners in an era of contested cooperation

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of development cooperation has been indelibly marked by three tectonic shifts in the global discourse about how countries relate to one another: calls for the decolonization of aid, the resurgence of great power competition, and fraying multilateralism. Within this conversation, Listening to Leaders 2021: A report card for development partners in an era of contested cooperation analyzes the results of a survey of nearly 7,000 public, private and civil society leaders from 141 countries and semi-autonomous territories around the world. Conducted from June-September of 2020, AidData's 2020 Listening to Leaders Survey asked these leaders about their top development priorities; the development partners with whom they worked, including 69 bilateral and multilateral donors and private foundations; and how they rated these partners' performance across multiple dimensions. The report demystifies what leaders want from their development partners in three respects: (1) the degree of convergence or divergence between what leaders, citizens, and donors prioritize as the most important problems to solve; (2) which attributes leaders valued most in a preferred partner; and (3) the desirability of different types of aid projects and data offered by development partners.