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. Aid transparency is essential if aid is to truly deliver on its promise.

There is currently too little readily available information about aid which undermines the efforts of aid donors, aid recipients and civil society to promote development and accountable governance.

Donors giving aid 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.

Recipients: Governments in countries that receive aid 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 funding projections, this impedes recipient governments’ 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: Civil society, including NGOs, legislators and citizens, has 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 has 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

We need more and better information for aid to deliver on its potential. This information needs to be timely, accessible, comparable and comprehensive.

Information needs to be regularly published and freely available if it is going to help accountability. In order to promote more effective aid, all donors need to provide the information in a common format that meets the needs of recipient governments and civil society. This common format would help donors to better coordinate aid; comparability is what transforms more aid information into better aid information. It would also help recipient governments to see the combined flows of all aid into their country and link it to their budgets.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative, in which Publish What You Fund participates, is the process which will agree and implement this common standard. Donors, recipient governments and civil society are all involved.

Despite this progress, it will require greater political will to ensure that a common standard is effectively implemented and the benefits of more and better aid information can be realised.