Welcome to the latest roundup of news from the world of aid and development transparency.

Watch the launch of the 2024 Aid Transparency Index

The results of the 2024 Aid Transparency Index show how aid and development data has never been so accessible and useful – and why it has never been more needed. Launched in July, the Index recorded the highest scores for the world’s major aid and development agencies and also found that more aid and development agencies, journalists, think tanks and civil society organisations are using the data to improve aid effectiveness and hold donors to account for their commitments to tackle poverty, conflict and the climate crisis. Some agencies, however, still have a long way to go to improve their transparency, and more information on impact and performance is urgently needed.

You can view all the Index results, and detailed profiles of the 50 assessed agencies, on our website.

At the launch event, hosted by the Brookings Institution, we heard a range of global perspectives on the importance and usefulness of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data – and why and how more people are now using it to make decisions, track progress and direct funding. It underlined why the publication of timely, quality aid and development information is so valuable and its role in tracking and directing progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

New timeline and methodology for the 2025 DFI Transparency Index

Work on the second DFI Transparency Index is underway, and we’re pleased to confirm it will be launched in July 2025. The Index ranks the transparency of the world’s leading development finance institutions (DFIs) and encourages improvement. Earlier this year we conducted a methodology review to improve the rigour of the DFI Transparency Index, while being careful to maintain comparability between editions. We updated the methodology following an in-depth internal review, in addition to consideration of feedback from stakeholders including civil society, the private sector, and DFIs. One of the key changes is the introduction of new climate finance indicators, reflecting the critical role that DFIs play in climate finance. Paul James has summarised the updates to the methodology and the timeline for data collection and analysis in a new blog.

Other news

Here’s a quick roundup of other news and publications we’ve been reading over the last few weeks:

Development Initiatives has launched a new report, Climate finance: Earning trust through consistent reporting, which finds that inconsistent measurement has eroded trust in climate finance and made progress difficult to track. The report highlights the problems with current climate finance reporting and also sets out practical steps that providers can take to help build a more trusted and transparent climate finance data system.

The Lowy Institute has released its 2024 key findings from the Southeast Asia Aid Map, an interactive database which tracks and maps aid and development finance flows from the international community to Southeast Asia. Drawing on over 120,000 projects from 107 development partners across 11 countries, the findings include:

• After a pandemic-related surge in support, total official development finance to the region fell to a new low of AU$26 billion in 2022.
• There has been a sharp decline in new Chinese development financing, though ongoing projects mean China is set to remain the dominant infrastructure financier in the region.
• Climate development finance dropped 15% in 2022.

The Share Trust has completed a detailed analysis of a US$80 million Alternative Pooled Fund model in the Middle East and found that an international NGO levied an overhead rate of 34% while its project’s local partners received nothing towards overhead costs. Its analysis finds that redeploying funds from an international partner to a local partner would result in cost efficiencies of 13.6% on salaries and overheads, realising US$545,000 in savings that could be used to deliver against unmet humanitarian needs.

In 2022, the countries that are Party to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to provide at least US$20 billion a year to low-income countries by 2025, increasing to at least US$30 billion a year by 2030. ODI’s new research assesses each wealthy country’s ‘fair share’ of the US$20 billion target, based on historic responsibility for biodiversity depletion, population and gross national income. It finds that only Norway and Sweden met or exceeded their ‘fair share’, while Japan, Italy, Canada and the UK are most responsible for the shortfall. It also says that the US – who are not Party to the Convention – should contribute an extra US$12.3 billion on top of the US$20 billion target.

Oxfam International has challenged the validity of figures showing that rich countries mobilised nearly US$116 billion in climate finance in 2022. Instead, Oxfam estimates that the “true value” of climate finance provided by rich countries in 2022 is only between US$28 billion and US$35 billion, with at most only US$15 billion earmarked for adaptation. Oxfam says that its figures reflect climate-related loans as their grant equivalents, rather than at their face value, in order to gauge rich countries’ real financial effort. Oxfam is calling for the new climate finance goal to require rich countries to provide more climate finance, and to be more accountable and transparent in their financing.

The Trust, Accountability and Inclusion Collaborative (TAI) has produced a data dashboard to investigate governance funding trends. It features OECD-DAC data from 2019 to 2022.

An ODA Reform blog by Simon Scott looks into Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) – an international standard for measuring the full array of resources to promote sustainable development. He argues that it is a collection of individual notifications of expenditure, where decision-making on what to report is left to each provider, and not a statistical system. He says that TOSSD’s published totals fall way short of actual official spending on what it sets out to measure and that it is difficult to envisage that TOSSD will be able to generate usable statistics in the foreseeable future.

Eye on Global Transparency reports that more than 55 countries have no access to information laws. It puts the lack of action down to a range of factors including hostile political environments, weakened civil society organisations and reduced financing from international and philanthropic organisations.

Spotlight on Corruption has launched a new report which finds that the UK’s unique use of its aid budget to fund law enforcement efforts to combat international corruption falls far short of what’s needed despite delivering welcome and valuable enforcement outcomes. It says that with capacity to investigate as little as 20 cases at any one time, the National Crime Agency’s aid-funded International Corruption Unit (ICU), is struggling under the weight of its workload. The report finds glaring enforcement gaps – no professional enabler of dirty money has yet been convicted under the programme, and no medium-sized companies have been convicted since the ICU took on the role of enforcement. The report also notes that much greater transparency of the unit’s work is needed – particularly on the enforcement outcomes that it achieves – to improve accountability and the deterrence effect of its work.

This Friday Times article reflects on Pakistan’s use of aid and its resulting debt. It considers the importance of aid transparency among donors and the Pakistan government, and the need to disclose and analyse outcomes and results data in order to improve the way development is done.

Integrity Action has been sharing details of its work, in collaboration with a team from the Okomu National Park Carbon Project in Southwest Nigeria, to develop tools that enhance citizen oversight and decision making in climate finance and climate action. The new tool is designed to bring the community’s voice into the delivery of carbon projects, ensuring that project implementers and government partners are held accountable to their promises, and building trust and transparency. Citizens will be trained to generate and share rich, real-time data, helping stakeholders understand where problems arise and how they can be solved, especially around benefit-sharing mechanisms.

In a new briefing, Eurodad critically analyses ODA data to provide a basis for discussion on the future of aid and development finance.

This ODI blog looks at how efforts to integrate gender equality into climate finance are being held back by fragmented reporting systems and inconsistent use of gender markers. It argues that greater transparency on what funding goes to whom and with what results can help to focus future finance that has collective impacts on climate and gender equality.

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