Aid has the power to radically transform lives. It can help lift people out of poverty and give assistance to those living in acute deprivation. But its potential is not being fully realised; we need to know more about how it is spent. Transparency in aid is essential if aid is to truly deliver on its promise.

There is currently too little readily available information about aid, undermining efforts of governments that give aid (aid donors), governments who receive aid (aid recipients) and civil society to promote development and accountability.

Donor governments don’t know what other donors are spending or planning to spend. This is leading to the duplication of efforts in some areas and underfunding in others. Without aid transparency, donors cannot coordinate to achieve the maximum impact with their scarce resources.

Recipient governments struggle to know how much aid is invested in their country, let alone where and how it is spent. Recipients need more information to make the most effective use of their own money alongside that of donors. When donors don’t publish their spending plans, this impedes the recipient’s ability to plan long term projects, which in turn hinders development. When recipients can’t include aid flows in their budgets and planning, it is hard for parliament and civil society to hold them to account.

Civil society in recipient countries, including NGOs, legislators and citizens, have the right to know what aid is coming into the country and what it’s being spent on. Because aid information isn’t freely available, they are hampered in their efforts to hold governments to account. This lack of transparency can lead to waste and increases the potential for corruption.

Civil society in donor countries have the right to know what aid is achieving. More and better information about aid and greater transparency will increase the incentive to improve the effectiveness of aid and fulfils taxpayers’ need to know that money is being well spent.

The aid transparency solution

The starting point for ensuring that aid makes a difference is having timely, comprehensive and comparable information on who is giving what, where it is going, and the impact it is having. Information on aid needs to be regularly published and freely available if it is going to help effective spending, evaluation, and accountability.

In order to promote more effective aid, all donors need to provide their aid information in a common format that meets the needs of recipient governments and civil society. Full engagement from donors would mean that a big picture of all aid flows could be available for all to see.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) now offers a common standard for publishing aid information. Currently, over 40 donor and recipient governments are already signed up to IATI, and over 20 governments and organisations are publishing their information to the IATI standard.

At the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4) in Busan in December 2011, the world’s most prominent development actors committed to publishing their aid information by 2015. Publish What You Fund will be working to ensure that donors redouble efforts to fulfill their commitments.

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