On 9th December Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Assessment was presented at Brookings in Washington, D.C.  We were joined by Ruth Levine of USAID’s Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning, Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan, Liberian finance minister, and Daniel Kaufmann, Brookings senior fellow for a panel discussion.

The Liberian Minister of Finance, Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan said, “what we request is that the similar requirements of transparency that you push on government, push it on those implementing partners”.

Ruth Levine, of USAID’s Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning said, “we welcome the international transparency efforts to create these common standards. The U.S. isn’t signatory to IATI largely because of procedural and some budgetary issues, but we’ve played an active role in the technical advisory group to shape the standard and ensure that we can use it to reduce the transaction costs all around, including as we advance aid transparency efforts in the U.S. Government. As we develop data systems and sources, they will be able to be cross walked with those standards.” She also said that the US Government was working towards “standardization in an OMB bulletin, which is kind of like the bible of financial reporting requirements for foreign assistance across the U.S. Government”.

Read the transcript on the Brookings website, or a shorter summary from the Develop Haiti blog