Our Principles
The Publish What You Fund principles were released in draft form in July 2008. They are designed to be signed up to by all public and private bodies engaged in funding and delivering aid, including donors (public or private), NGOs and aid contractors.
1. Information on aid should be published proactively – An organisation should tell people what they are doing, when and how. They should develop the necessary systems to collect, generate and ensure the automatic and timely disclosure of, at a minimum, information on aid strategies and flows, terms and procurement of aid, integrity procedures, assessment of aid effectiveness and impact, public participation and access to information.
2. Information on aid should be comprehensive, comparable, timely and accessible - Information on aid should be of sufficient quality to be meaningful for recipient governments, civil society organizations, other stakeholders, and the public in donor and recipient decisions. Key characteristics of how aid information is made available are that it is comprehensive, timely and comparable both between different donors and with recipient countries' own spending. For further details of characteristics, see box 2, p. 3 of Briefing Paper 1.
3. Everyone has the right to request and receive information about aid - Public bodies engaged in funding and delivering aid should guarantee the right of access to information, both through proactive publication of information and by establishing mechanisms by which everyone can request and receive information.
4. The right of access to information about aid should be promoted - Donors and recipient governments as well as other actors disbursing aid should assist citizens to exercise their right of access to information on aid. They should inform parliamentarians, journalists, civil society representatives, and the general public, and communities directly affected by aid activities, about the right of access to information on aid. Staff of organisations bound by these principles should be trained on their obligation to provide information to the public.
Related efforts include:
The Global Transparency Initiative - 8 principles on IFI transparency, and
ONE's TRACK principles - the 'T' being for 'Transparency'.