Why is the EU a target?

European Union countries provide some 60% of world development aid. They each have one or more national development agency and pool money through multilateral bodies including the European Commission, World Bank, regional development banks and the United Nations. European governments can directly implement new transparency approaches and have a strong say in changes in multilateral institutions.

Increased transparency is vital for donor and recipient government officials, parliamentarians and citizens groups to push decision-makers to implement the improved aid programming, spending and reporting to which they have committed. It is also vital to guard against a potential dilution of poverty objectives through pressures to use development assistance funding to meet defence, climate, trade or other commitments, or to count as development assistance funding that primarily aims at other objectives.

What do we want?

The advocacy activities of Publish What You Fund reflect the need to encourage national government champions to agree to work on transparency, and for them to table proposals at the European Union level. PWYF will also work directly with European Union institutions to introduce transparency into policies, legislation and reporting. Working with allies in Brussels and across the European Union PWYF will build up a dynamic between the national and regional levels that leads to momentum for real transparency reform.

Some recipient countries are receiving aid from up to 15 bilateral EU donors. Timely and accessible aid information disclosure is needed so that citizens and parliamentarians can expose laggards and praise champions in moving to divide labour, use joint financing and reporting arrangements. Bilateral governmental aid organisations are currently implementing aid projects through a fragmented network of agencies and NGOs. As a consequence there is a lack of predictability with great disparity between commitment and the disbursement of funds, making basic data difficult to obtain. Incomplete and inconsistent information undermines the goal of recipient country ownership as ministries and agencies struggle to assess what money they have and are likely to have from overseas donors.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) should deliver a technical standard for aid transparency in the coming few months. As this has significant European representation there should in principle be no obstacle to rolling that out across the EU.

How are we doing this?

Publish What You Fund will research and use European arguments. The nature of the advocacy will be either to press for adoption of new measures or for vigorous follow-up depending on when a new aid transparency initiative is agreed. Publish What You Fund will use precedents of existing treaty language, legislation, communications, and announcements which provide pegs for follow-up advocacy.

Andris Piebalgs, the new European Commissioner for Development, told the European Parliament as part of his confirmation hearings that “I consider that enhanced transparency, increased cooperation and effective follow-up to Parliament's positions and requests for legislative initiatives is a precondition for the Commission and myself as a Commissioner and my Services, to carry out our functions and objectives effectively and efficiently” and that “improving monitoring and evaluation of development assistance is also a priority”.

EU-wide initiatives on transparency and accountability can also be used. The previous Commission launched a European Transparency Initiative, for example, in which the EU “committed itself to full transparency about who receives monies from the EU budget.”[ There will very likely be some successor initiative under the new Commission.

Many organisations have already expressed interest in, or started, working on aid transparency. Transparency is an issue which unites many civil society groups, all of whom understand that more timely and comprehensive data will help them perform their roles as watchdogs of government policy. 2010 shows the current problems particularly clearly. It is a year when European Union governments are supposed to meet aid level targets. However European NGOs are not able to hold their governments properly to account at this time because the 2010 aid data will only be released in preliminary form in April 2011, and in final form at the end of 2011. 

The primary constituency that is interested in working with PWYF to press for aid transparency is development NGOs. These groups operate individually – with some large groups having a strong voice on their own – and in families (for example organised along religious lines), networks (with specialist expertise) and platforms. PWYF is open to working with all groups, and its messages and technical work can be taken up by any of the organisation.

[1] European Transparency Initiative. http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/kallas/work/eu_transparency/recipients_en.htm.