What do leaders in low- and middle-income countries consider development priorities? What reform progress do they see? What data and evidence do they use for decision-making? How can development partners be more influential and helpful? To answer these questions, AidData fielded the second wave of large-scale survey: the 2017 Listening to Leaders Survey, following the 2014 Reform Efforts Survey. Nearly 3,500 responses were collected from leaders in 126 low- and middle-income countries.
The survey was fielded to a carefully constructed sampling frame of approximately 55,000 government officials, development partner official, civil society leaders, private sector representatives and independent experts. It took five years to create this sampling frame, which AidData has consistently updated it to reflect the most recent changes. Of all the individuals in the sampling frame, 47,000 successfully received the email invitation to take the survey in one of six different languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic. 3,468 participated (a 7.4% response rate) and 1,441 of those survey respondents (41%) completed the survey.
Key findings from the 2017 Listening to Leaders Survey are featured in two flagship reports by AidData: Listening to Leaders 2018: Is development cooperation tuned-in or tone-deaf? and Decoding Data Use: How do leaders source data and use it to accelerate development?
Funding: This research was made possible through generous financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
