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

How transparent are climate funds?

How can we tell if we’re on track to meet the new $300 billion climate finance goal? And how do we know that climate finance is effective, efficient and equitable? To answer these questions, transparency is vital.

Multilateral climate funds play a key role in channelling these resources. Our latest research, Better Data for Better Outcomes, examines the transparency of the four largest climate funds, the Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility, Climate Investment Funds, and Adaptation Fund.

Our key findings:

• These funds share good financial and project-level data on their own websites.
• However, only one (GEF) publishes open data in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard.

In this blog, Alex Tilley and Ryan Anderton outline how the funds can enhance their transparency to enable comparability with other climate funding as well as development and humanitarian finance, and make it easier for governments, CSOs and citizens to get a complete picture of the funding coming into their country.

Making additionality count

Billions of dollars of official development assistance (ODA) are now directed to private sector investments, much of it channelled through development finance institutions (DFIs). How do DFIs justify the ‘additionality’ of these investments – that is, how do they demonstrate that their support generates development or financial outcomes that would not be realised through the market alone?

Publish What You Fund’s new research paper, Making Additionality Count, examines how well bilateral DFIs are disclosing the additionality of private sector instruments under the OECD’s updated reporting rules. We found that many DFIs fall short on transparency – using vague, inconsistent or incomplete justifications for how their investments are additional.

As the OECD transition period for reporting ends in 2026, DFIs and donors have a critical window to improve disclosure on additionality. In this blog, Ella Remande-Guyard discusses how strong, consistent reporting is fundamental to our understanding of whether public money is crowding in private finance or simply replacing it, and for ensuring that scarce aid is directed where it delivers clear, demonstrable value.

Localisation re-imagined: Funding for local actors in a changing aid landscape

Wednesday 28th May, 11am-12:30pm EST/4pm-5:30pm BST
Online event

Publish What You Fund’s three recent localisation studies have found that commitments from major donors and philanthropies to increase local funding have not led to meaningful change. Our forthcoming research, Metrics Matter 3, shows that five major bilateral donors are still only providing a fraction directly to local organisations. Even as ODA levels reached a peak of $223.3 billion in 2023, progress on local funding seems to have stalled, or in some cases gone backwards.

But in the last three months the world has changed and the conversation on localisation has gone quiet. As donors, INGOs and local CSOs scramble to make sense of the changing aid landscape and, in many cases, fight for survival, where are we on locally led development? Have previous commitments and good intentions been quietly discarded? What’s next for the local partners who have lost funding, and lost trust?

Join us on 28th May as we bring together voices from local groups, INGOs, think tanks and funders to explore the current state of locally led development, the old and new barriers to change, and what needs to happen for local actors to have the power, resources and recognition they deserve. We’ll discuss if this is the time to rethink how we approach localisation.

Book your place

Expanding transparency beyond Official Development Assistance

As traditional aid shrinks, non-ODA financial flows are increasingly crucial. Their transparency, however, lags far behind. In this blog, Tessie San Martin (FHI 360), George Ingram (Brookings Institution) and Sally Paxton (Publish What You Fund) assert that better visibility into non-ODA flows will unlock smarter investments and stronger outcomes. Therefore, extending transparency is essential to ensure new development funding achieves real impact.

Is FFD4 turning its back on aid transparency?

As the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) takes shape, there is a concerning silence around aid transparency. At a time when transparency is more vital than ever – to ensure that scarce development finance is accountable, effective, and impactful -it appears to be falling off the agenda. The most notable omission is any mention of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) – the global standard for publishing open data on development and humanitarian funding. Most of the world’s major donors now publish their aid information using the IATI standard, helping to improve coordination, accountability, and decision-making. In this blog, Gary Forster warns that the FFD4 process risks squandering this progress by failing to make a firm commitment to transparency.

Friends of Publish What You Fund welcome Tessie San Martin as new Chair

Tessie San Martin has been appointed as the new Chair of Friends of Publish What You Fund (our partner organisation based in the US), taking over from George Ingram who has chaired the organisation for a decade. We would like to thank George for his years of service and valuable contributions to Friends, to Publish What You Fund, and to the development community. We look forward to working with Tessie, CEO of FHI 360, who will bring great experience and leadership to the role.

Sign up for our free training on using aid and development data

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💰 Who is funding what, where, and why?

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In one hour, we’ll introduce you to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)—the leading global open aid dataset. Learn how to access and navigate over a million development, humanitarian, and climate projects to support your research, planning, fundraising, advocacy, or campaigning.

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Protecting transparency in US foreign assistance

In written testimony to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs, George Ingram and Sally Paxton outline the strong Congressional support for transparency in US foreign assistance, the loss of critical data through the dismantling of USAID’s website, and the need to restore and maintain valuable data and information for the benefit of Congress, the administration, the American people and development partners.

Other news

Here’s a quick roundup of other news and publications we’ve been reading over the last few weeks:
Official Development Assistance (ODA) fell in 2024 to US$ 212.1 billion according to preliminary figures released by the OECD. This represents a drop of 7.1% in real terms compared to 2023, following five years of consecutive growth. According to the OECD, the fall was due to a reduction in contributions to international organisations, as well as a decrease in aid for Ukraine, lower levels of humanitarian aid and reduced spending on hosting refugees in donor countries. ONE has produced an ODA dashboard, providing an accessible format for users to explore trends in ODA by factors such as providers, recipients, sectors, and gender. Eurodad responded to the new ODA figures, warning of a deeper crisis in future.

This New Humanitarian article reports that the vast information networks that inform the humanitarian system are teetering on the brink of collapse, as a result of US budget cuts. It warns that a ‘humanitarian data drought’ could hamper the ability of humanitarians to know where help is most urgently needed, and provides examples of the data collection and analysis tools that are already affected.
This Development Gateway blog (with Results for Development and Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data) also looks at the consequences of US cuts on data and digital systems. It warns of the destabilisation of the data ecosystems that underpin global health, education, nutrition, agriculture, water, and sanitation services, which could undermine development and humanitarian efforts long into the future. It says that as well as data collection, the cuts threaten the move towards the modernisation of data systems as countries look ahead to digital transformation, digital public infrastructure, and AI readiness. The authors offer a way forward for reimagined data systems, increasing emphasis on data sovereignty, data localisation, and data protection, including close attention to where systems are hosted and how their availability is funded and guaranteed.
Devex has been examining the USAID cuts to understand their effect on the multilateral system. It found that 17 major organisations have cumulatively lost nearly US$4.1 billion. These included 14 UN agencies, the vaccine alliance Gavi and the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Devex has also looked into the 23 non-profit organisations that have lost a combined US$6 billion and the 20 for-profit contractors that have lost at least US$100 million each due to the cuts.
Meanwhile, researchers at the Center for Global Development (CGD) have also been tracking the USAID cuts and produced estimates of the impacts at country level. The country analysis suggests a number of country programmes may have been effectively closed down, particularly in Central and East Asia and also in West Africa, Central Europe, and the Americas. In absolute dollar value, by far the largest cut is to the Ukraine programme, followed by Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. CGD has also looked into the impact of the shuttering of the US Millennium Challenge Corporation and the countries that will be affected.
Another casualty of the US cuts was USAID’s Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC). The Institute for Development Impact (I4DI) has created a “DEC Finder” site that allows users to access over 111,000 documents from the 200,000 documents formerly available through the DEC website. This includes evaluation reports, assessment documents, literature reviews and technical guidance.
A new paper from CGD examines whether the World Bank is directing climate adaptation finance to the most vulnerable countries. After constructing a country-level dataset based on almost 3000 World Bank adaptation finance projects in 129 countries over the last decade, it finds the most vulnerable, least-prepared countries receive less climate adaptation finance from the World Bank than their better-prepared counterparts. And the seven most vulnerable countries by CGD’s metrics—Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Mali, Niger, and Somalia—receive an average of US$2 per person per year in adaptation finance, a fraction of what many countries with higher adaptive capacity receive.
AidData’s latest Listening to Leaders report looks at 13,000 survey responses from public, private and civil society leaders in the Global South on questions of development partnership over the last ten years. The authors aim to provide evidence-based insights on how development cooperation can and should evolve to meet future challenges and opportunities.

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