LONDON – Despite making several international transparency commitments, the vast majority of the world’s donors are still not sharing enough data about their development activities.

The Aid Transparency Index (ATI), released today by Publish What You Fund, is the industry standard for assessing transparency among the top 68 aid-giving organisations, from countries including the U.S. and Germany, to influential organisations such as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation.

The United Nations Development Programme came first, knocking the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation off last year’s top spot, and China finished last for the second year in a row. Most donors ranked in the ATI still do not publish information about their activities in a meaningful way, making the data hard to access and use.

Rachel Rank, Publish What You Fund, said:

“A lot of progress was made at the political level in the early days of aid transparency, including a promise to publish aid information to an internationally-agreed common standard by the end of 2015. But with a year to go until that deadline, progress has stalled. The ranking shows that no matter how many international promises are made, and no matter how many speeches there are around openness, a startling amount of organisations are still not publishing what they fund.”

Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator, said:

“Transparency is core to our mission. We are gratified to be recognized for our efforts to operate in an open, transparent manner. UNDP is committed to working in the open to spark innovation, to ensure the best possible use of funds entrusted to it and to accelerate the development of a sustainable future for all.”

Dalitso Kubalasa, Malawi Economic Justice Network, said:

“The ATI is an important measure of donors’ commitments to greatly help make their aid transparent – which is something we have asked for (and we will continue asking for) again and again. Donors must continue to push themselves to publish all the information as it can genuinely increase chances of making aid work better and much more effectively. If donors want to truly see the maximum value for their aid, they must walk the talk of transparency and accountability; with no any element of double standards in a true spirit of partnership. They must intensify publishing all information on their development cooperation properly to achieve all the intended development results.”

As in previous years, the ATI results show that a leading group of organisations are publishing large amounts of useful information on their current aid activities. Several agencies, including from the U.N., France and Japan, have made big improvements this year by publishing more information in accessible and comparable formats.

However, these efforts are being undermined by those donors that are failing to deliver on their commitments. In order to realise the transformative potential of open data in improving development effectiveness, the donor community needs to work together to drive forward collective action on aid transparency and learn from best practice on data use.

To see all the findings of the 2014 ATI, visit: http://ati.publishwhatyoufund.org

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Contact:          Nicole Valentinuzzi T: +44 (0)7726 831 197 / +1 202.701.9753 nicole@publishwhatyoufund.org

Notes:

1. Publish What You Fund is the global campaign for aid transparency, advocating for a significant increase in the availability and accessibility of comprehensive, timely and comparable aid information. The organisation monitors the transparency of aid donors in order to track progress, encourage further transparency and hold them to account. The ATI is the only global measure of aid transparency.
2. At the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011, the world’s largest aid providers committed to publishing their data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) by the end of 2015. IATI is the only global common standard for publishing aid information that ensures data is timely, comprehensive, comparable & accessible.
3. Watch the event live on 8 Oct @ 9am ET: https://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/livestream/ and join in on twitter #2014ATI