Publish What You Fund - The Global Campaign for Aid Transparency

The Publish What You Fund Campaign is a new initiative to promote transparency of international aid. It is formed by civil society groups from around the world, including organizations working on aid effectiveness and groups working on access to government information.

These organizations believe that for aid to be effective, accountable and participatory it must be transparent: information must be available to recipient governments, affected communities, and other stakeholders as well as the general public.

The Publish What You Fund Campaign was launched on 1 September 2008 in Accra, Ghana, at the global CSO meeting on Aid Effectiveness.

All civil society organizations, media organizations, individuals and elected representatives are invited to join the Publish What You Fund Campaign. Click here to contact the Publish What You Fund Campaign team.

Why Transparency is Key to Making Aid Effective

Transparency and accountability between donors and recipient governments is fundamental for effective aid and for there to be ownership of aid processes by developing countries. Donors therefore have a special obligation to share information with recipient governments. At the same time, wider transparency is essential to ensure that members of the public, in donor and recipient countries, are able to engage in the debate about the use of aid.

The Publish What You Fund Principles bring together the need for greater aid effectiveness with the fundamental right of everyone to know how public bodies are using public resources.

The Publish What You Fund Principles

Publish What You Fund has brought together leading NGOs and NGO coalitions to draft a first set of consultation materials – the Publish What You Fund principles. The first draft of these principles was disseminated in July 2008.

These principles are designed so that, once finalised, they will be formally endorsed and implemented by all public and private bodies engaged in funding and delivering aid including donors – (public or private), recipient governments, NGOs and contractors.

The four draft principles are:
1. Information on aid should be published proactively
2. Everyone has the right to request and receive information about aid
3. Information on aid should be timely, accessible and comparable
4. The right of access to information about aid should be promoted

These principles have had one round of consultation (between July and August 2008) and were presented at the Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (Ghana, 2-4 September 2008). There will be two further rounds of consultation (closing 30 September and 31 March) and the final Publish What You Fund Principles will be published in April 2009. Click here to read the principles and to give your comments.

The Publish What You Fund Campaign has also defined a detailed listing of the classes of information that should be generated and made available proactively without the need for the public to request the information. In line with the Principles, the classes of information should be made available in the formats languages that are useful for the stakeholders directly affected by aid projects.

The Need for Publish What You Fund

• Comprehensive and timely information on aid flows leads to more informed policy and spending choices by both donors and recipients;
• Better tracking of aid strengthens monitoring and evaluation of development efforts and is an important tool in fighting corruption;
• Access to information means CSOs and citizens in the South can hold donors and recipient governments to account for the quantity and quality of aid;
• Lack of predictability of aid seriously undermines recipient government planning and implementation capacity
• Inaccurate aid flow estimates inhibit macroeconomic stability and planning;
• For donors, lack of information makes it hard to identify aid ‘orphans’ and aid ‘darlings’, both between countries as well as within countries and sectors.

Transparency in aid could enable more effective planning and implementation of donor, government and non-governmental resources. It allows for more efficient decision-making and implementation, as well as decreasing the risk of corruption. Aid transparency can strengthen the relation between citizens and the state in recipient countries, and increase public support for aid in donor countries. Transparency enables participation and democratic engagement by citizens in the aid process– in both donor and recipient countries.

What the Publish What You Fund Campaign is working for:

• Promoting political debate and progress on aid transparency at national and international level, including on key issues such as allocation criteria, conditionalities, as well as aid flows and activities;
• Ensuring the right information is available at the right time and in the right format for all aid actors (citizens, civil society, media, recipient governments and donors);
• Ensuring the automatic and timely disclosure by donors of aid documentation including programming documents, monitoring and evaluation data and procurement procedures, criteria, tenders and decisions;
• Ensuring country-level information is presented in comparable formats, in line with national budget cycles and classifications, which allow all aid activities to be compared with national level plans and policies;
• Securing the rights of stakeholders to request and receive information on aid;
• Encouraging the coordination of the emerging aid transparency movement.