The model is meant to buy scale, continuity and flexibility; in practice, it also concentrates delivery in a small number of firms. The facility is no longer one delivery option among many; for large, complex programs, it has become the default. My view, shaped by working within or evaluating facilities for more than a decade (including the Australia-Africa Partnership Facility, the Australia-Mekong Water Facility, the Pacific Labour Mobility Facility and the Kiribati Facility), is that MEL is the hinge on which facility performance turns. The recent independent evaluation of Prospera, DFAT’s AUD277 million economic governance facility in Indonesia, found much the same pattern. The evaluation base remains thinner than it should be, so the peer review’s call for more systematic evaluation is welcome.