Aid Transparency
We will make aid more transparent (Accra Agenda for Action, § 24)
In 2008 the international community met in Accra, Ghana at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness Transparency organised by the OECD and agreed the Accra Agenda for Action to assure that development cooperation becomes more effective in fighting global poverty. This process, that started at with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 and defines principles that donors and partner countries should adhere. They agreed that “Transparency and accountability are are essential elements for development results. They lie at the heart of the Paris Declaration.” In November 2011 donors and partner countries will convene again at the fourth High Level Meeting on Aid effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, to take stock of the progress achieved so far and the future steps to take.
Sofar, the promise of Accra has not been fulfilled. The evaluation of the Paris process, commissioned by the OECD, is very clear in its findings: overall progress in aid transparency has been slow. Particularly donors have failed to increase their transparency. It is high time for donor agencies, civil society organisations, media representatives and the government in donor countries to make the transparency of development cooperation a high priority. The Open Aid Data Conference is being organised in order to stimulate a public debate about aid transparency and to drive change in this area.
While overall progress has been slow, some donors were able to demonstrate successfully, that more transparencyis possible. In 2010 the Worldbank launched its open data initiative and promoted the public use of its data through its programming contest “Apps4Development”. Sweden, Norway and the USA created dashboards for their citizens to get a better understanding of how aid monies are used. DFID and Sweden gave aid transparency guarantees and following an independent review recommending stronger focus on transparency the Australian government will launch a transparency charter later this year. In addition a group of international donors including HIVOS, the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations and the Hewlett Foundation started the Transparency and Accountability Initiative to enhance learning about the potential of technology for transparency and to promote scientific research about the impact of aid transparency.
But individual activities in aid transparency are not enough. If partner countries and civil society in aid recipient countries are to benefit from more transparency, the information of different donors has to be comparable. This is why a group of donors at the High Level Forum in Accra in 2008 launched the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI is a network of donors, partner countries and civil society organisations aimed to take concrete steps to make comprehensive and up-to-date aid information easily accessible, comparable and re-usable for all stakeholders in development cooperation. Signatories of IATI are five multilateral organisations (Worldbank, African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Commission and UNDP), three private donors (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Hewlett Foundation) and twelve bilateral donors (Australia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and UK). In contrast to the OECD DAC data platform, the Creditor Reporting System (CRS), IATI is also open to non-OECD members, to private foundations and to non-governmental donors.
In February 2011 members of IATI agreed the first international open aid data standard, the IATI standard, and created a registry, as a one-stop-shop for donor data. The ambition was for the signatory organisations to provide data in IATI standard before Busan, but implementation of the commitment is slow. So far only the Worldbank, the UK, the Hewlett Foundation and the British NGO aidinfo published information through the registry. But other donors like Sweden, Australia, UNDP and the European Commission are planning to provide some IATI data before Busan.
Not only bilateral and multilateral donors are challenged to increase their transparency. Also non-governmental donors are under pressure to make their aid more effective and to respect the Paris principles in their activities. The International NGO Accountability Charter is a network of large international NGOs to improve the accountability of NGOs. In June 2011 representatives of this network met in Geneva to analyse how they can adopt IATI and whether changes are needed so that NGOs can report data according to the IATI standard.
Aid transparency is also an issue within partner countries. For example in Nepal different activities are underway focusing on the transparency of aid flows. Faced with the political vacuum and administrative standstill donors in Nepal, coordinated by UNDP, launched an aid transparency initiative to improve coordination and cooperation at the national level. INGOs like ActionAid develop new standards on what they report to citizens about their activities. The national chapter of Transparency International in Nepal will soon undertake a study on aid transparency and a group of independent researchers got together in Nepal to create the Alliance for Aid Monitor Nepal. This local interest is a propicious environment to promote the use of aid information. The British NGO aidinfo, part of the IATI secretariat, chose Nepal for a pilot study on the availability, the accessibility and the use of aid data. Part of this pilot will be a barcamp on aid data organised by YIPL in Kathmandu.
We may have only limited hard evidence on the relevance of aid data so far. But there are some studies that are well worth mentioning in the context of aid transparency. Very well known is the study by Reinikka and Svensson (2004) on Public Expenditure Tracking in Uganda. A similar study by Svensson and Björkmann (2009) focussed on the impact of community-based monitoring and publication of quality indicators on service delivery in health centers in Uganda. Directly related to aid effectiveness and specifically to aid allocation is research by Jörg Faust (2010). Interesting, though preliminary, findings on the impact of donor transparency on corruption have been by a team of researchers associated with the AidData project in the USA.