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

Behind the billions: New dataset exposes the $54 billion gap in MDB climate finance transparency

Last month COP30 drew the world’s attention to global efforts to accelerate climate action. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) play a central role in the provision of climate finance for emerging and developing economies, yet questions remain about where their billions are going and how effectively they are being used. We have just launched a new report and accompanying dataset, Behind the billions: tracking the missing pieces of MDB climate finance data. The dataset is the first cross-MDB repository compiling all publicly available, project-level climate finance data disclosed by MDBs between 2021 and 2023.

The findings reveal that $54 billion of MDBs’ reported climate finance cannot be traced to specific projects. While MDBs collectively reported $307 billion over this period, only $253 billion appears in project-level disclosures, leaving a major portion unaccounted for.

The report finds that over the 2021–2023 period, only six of eleven MDBs publish project-level climate finance data. Just two of these (Asian Development Bank and Inter-American Development Bank) publish complete, machine-readable datasets aligned with their aggregate totals for all three years.

See more details here

The year in review

2025 has been a turbulent year for international development. Aid budgets shrank, climate finance demands surged, and political pressure on development agencies – particularly in the United States – intensified. Against this backdrop, at Publish What You Fund we redoubled our efforts to defend open data, strengthen transparency norms, and equip policymakers, civil society and citizens with the information they need to protect development effectiveness. The core pillars of our new strategy – to make aid transparency bigger, better and louder – shaped our interventions throughout the year, from climate finance to localisation to development finance.

And in case you missed any of our resources, events, research or advocacy, we’ve rounded up our key activities and achievements for 2025.

See the review here

Tracking funding to end child marriage

We’ve recently been collaborating with Girls First Fund and Girls Not Brides to map international funding to end child marriage. We’ve used our knowledge and understanding of global aid data sources to analyse funding flows over the last decade. This evidence will be used by Girls Not Brides and Girls First Fund to inform their critical research and advocacy work in this area.

Our collaborators have written this blog on why they commissioned the research and how it will be used. It also reveals our early finding that funding targeted at interventions with a primary objective of ending child marriage between 2015 and 2024 made up just 0.025% of ODA. The full analysis will be released in February 2026.

Read the blog here

Other news

Here’s a quick roundup of other news and publications we’ve been reading over the last few weeks:
A new report from AidData, Chasing China, analyses comprehensive and granular sources of evidence on China’s funding. It is based on AidData’s China’s Global Loans and Grants Dataset, which tracks 30,000 projects and activities across 217 countries financed with grants and loans from 1,193 Chinese official sector donors and lenders worth $2.2 trillion from 2000 to 2023. The report demonstrates that China’s overseas lending portfolio is vastly larger than previously understood. However, its lending for Belt and Road infrastructure projects in the global south accounts for a small share (20%) of the overall portfolio. Meanwhile, the share of the lending portfolio that supports high-income and upper-middle income countries has skyrocketed from 12% to 76%. Chinese state-owned creditors have bankrolled approximately 10,000 projects and activities in 72 high-income countries to the tune of nearly $1 trillion. The authors conclude that the US and its allies are now seeking to compete with China via emulation rather than differentiation.

A new web tool – DevExplorer – has just been launched to provide AI-assisted search and analysis of programmes and projects from the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) registry. DevExplorer was initiated as part of a pilot programme from the Frontier Tech Hub, funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. It says the AI technology is one thousand times faster at extracting insights from the global dataset.

Center for Global Development has launched the Commitment to Development Index 2025, which looks at how rich and influential countries contribute to global development across trade, migration, climate, technology, security, investment, and development finance. It finds that this year, countries are moving in the wrong direction on development, with 24 slipping back on key policy commitments. Of the top ten countries, only Norway has improved compared with two years ago. On five of the eight policy areas, most countries’ performance deteriorated, including on finance, trade, and security.

In the first of a new Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network blog series, Sally Paxton and George Ingram have assessed the state of play of sources of information on US foreign assistance. Apart from partial data published to Foreignassistance.gov and a re-launched Famine Early Warning System Network website, they find most data, evaluations, and strategies are still missing. As well as calling for the restoration of data and other critical information, they highlight that the Department of State needs the capacity to deliver on transparency functions – to meet its legal and accountability obligations.

In this ODI Global blog, Mark Brough outlines the work that has been done to create the Liberia Development Dashboard – which tracks development funding, activities and outcomes. The focus on a simple and useful dashboard that imports IATI data and is easy to maintain and use, means it has been visited almost 20,000 times in the last year. The dashboard is used for sectoral coordination, in the budget process, to produce quarterly development reports and to manage partner relations – and it has also been used by a range of external stakeholders, including journalists, academics and the World Bank.

Devex has launched the Aid Report, a news site dedicated to tracking the real-world impacts of US foreign aid cuts. It combines original reporting, verified crowdsourced updates, and curated data and stories from credible sources to provide an evidence-based view of what’s happening on the ground. Its goal is to inform the debate about the future of US international aid, and it is open for contributions of stories and data.

Writing in the Independent Uganda, Dr Peter Wandwasi examines how conditional donor funding, inadequate transparency and Information asymmetry are impacting the effectiveness of the UN development system. He calls for a systemic review and a holistic approach that considers local needs and priorities.

The Guardian and Carbon Brief have analysed climate finance flows, based on submissions to the UN and data from the OECD. While they found “a broadly functioning system that shifts capital from rich polluters to vulnerable nations” they also report that due to the lack of central oversight and reliance on country discretion, climate finance could be subject to political interests and not always directed where it was most needed. The investigation found that about a fifth of the funding in 2021 and 2022 went to 44 least developed countries, though “vast sums” went to China and petrostates, including UAE which received more than $1 billion in loans and Saudi Arabia which received $328 million in loans.

ODI Global’s new report with the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance analyses which rich countries contributed their fair share of the $100 billion climate finance goal. It finds that five European countries emerge as climate finance leaders once quality and quantity are taken into account: Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden. But a number of large economies continue to fall dramatically short including Australia, Italy, Spain and the US.

The Donor Tracker team has updated its Budget Cuts Tracker with the latest developments from several key donor markets. This update reflects newly released budget documents that are shaping the future trajectory of ODA.

International IDEA’s new report assesses the impact of foreign aid cuts on the democracy, rights, governance and peacebuilding (DRGP) ecosystem. It reveals that almost 70% of all US government-funded DRGP awards – more than 1,600 grants worth more than $14 billion-have been terminated, affecting thousands of civil society organisations, independent media outlets, journalists and human rights defenders in more than 120 countries. This includes 97% of the number of USAID and 51% of all State Department DRGP awards; all electoral assistance and most funding to independent media have been wiped out.

A new report from the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) explores the funding challenges facing refugee-led organisations (RLOs). It finds just $49 million in funding reached RLOs in 2024 – compared to the $4.7 billion provided to nine UN Refugee Response Plans in the same year. While private foundations are leading the way, public donors were conspicuously absent from the funding picture – providing $1.2 million to RLOs in 2024. The $3 million provided by UNHCR represents 0.1% of its total organisational income. HPG argues that misleading narratives lie at the heart of the failure to adequately fund refugee leadership.

The Paris21 Partner Report on Support to Statistics 2025 signals that overall financing for data and statistics has increased, driven by a rebound from DAC donors. Still, the sector’s stability relies on a relatively small funding community, where each donor’s decision has an outsized impact on the overall landscape. To mitigate future risks, Paris21 calls on stakeholders to invest in domestic resource mobilisation and ensure that data and statistical development are integrated into national strategic plans and budget frameworks to reduce dependence on external donors.

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