Foreign aid allocation without aid transparency

Governments should allocate aid budgets through the channels that will most effectively alleviate poverty and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Without greater transparency of their spending and impact, how can we know that development finance institutions (DFIs) are an appropriate vehicle for aid spending? In the latest blog in our series on DFI transparency, Gary Forster teams up with CAFOD’s Dario Kenner to explore how governments and shareholders can be confident that DFI investments are delivering impact and value for money. Taking the example of the UK’s CDC Group, they ask If CDC’s portfolio is making a game-changing contribution to the SDGs and whether greater transparency is needed to answer this question.

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Other reads…

And here’s what else we’ve been reading…

Human Rights Watch has released a new report which states that the Syrian Government is co-opting humanitarian aid and reconstruction assistance, and in places using it to entrench repressive policies. It calls for donors and investors to make changes in their aid and investment practices to ensure that any funding they provide to Syria advances Syrians’ rights. Based on interviews with humanitarians, donors, experts, and beneficiaries, as well as a review of publicly available data on humanitarian and development assistance and reconstruction, the report makes interesting reading in relation to local transparency needs.

The Center for Global Development’s David Evans has shared ten examples where simply providing information changed behaviour. The list includes a case in Uganda where giving information to communities about the size of grants that their schools were supposed to be receiving from the central government led to more money reaching the schools and—ultimately—higher student enrolment and test scores.

The language of data has come up in a couple of recent blogs. The Open Data Institute makes the case for the need to build a language around data that people can understand and engage with. Meanwhile, a blog from Luke Stark & Anna Lauren Hoffmann explores how the language we use to describe data can also help us fix its problems.

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