News roundup – who will be assessed in the 2026 Aid Transparency Index + what’s in our new dataset of MDB climate finance
Welcome to the latest roundup of news from the world of aid and development transparency.
2026 Aid Transparency Index: Full list of assessed agencies unveiled
We can now reveal the 34 agencies that will be assessed in the 2026 Aid Transparency Index. The Index has been a cornerstone of global transparency efforts since 2012, providing rigorous, peer-reviewed analysis of how aid and development finance is disclosed. To ensure the sustainability of this valued accountability tool, we have adapted the model for the 2026 Index.
Sixteen agencies have chosen to participate in the paid-for accreditation and assessment process. We are pleased to announce that the Green Climate Fund will participate in the Index for the first time, and the United Nations Development Programme, a leader in aid transparency, has joined the list of participating organisations. These participating agencies will benefit from training and peer networking, engagement and feedback from the highly experienced Publish What You Fund team and will also receive accreditation for their transparency performance.
To maintain the Index’s role as an independent measure of the transparency of the world’s major aid and development organisations, we will also include 18 of the major bilateral donors assessed in the 2024 Index. These agencies have chosen not to sign up for the full accreditation process, but they will be scored alongside the accredited organisations, using the same assessment method and scoring approach, and they will all appear in the Index ranking.
📅 The Index will be launched in November 2026.
MDB climate finance in 2024: what does the latest data tell us?
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) collectively report $437 billion in climate finance investments between 2021 and 2024. But $71 billion remains untraceable to projects.
Why does this matter? Because without project-level transparency, we can’t answer basic questions, such as who is implementing the projects, what countries and sectors are they in, and are institutions delivering what they report?
We’ve just released an updated MDB Climate Finance Dataset, the first compilation of all publicly available, project-level MDB climate finance for the years 2021 to 2024. The latest data identifies ~6,500 climate-tagged investments totalling $366 billion.
There are some improvements, but five MDBs still publish zero project-level climate finance data. In this new blog, Ella Remande-Guyard explains why this transparency shortfall matters, and what we can learn from the available data.
CABEI and Publish What You Fund sign agreement to improve transparency
We’re pleased to announce our new agreement with the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) to help strengthen the Bank’s transparency and institutional openness. We’re excited to be collaborating with CABEI on a range of joint initiatives to improve access to information, enhance accountability, and align with international best practice.
For more details of the range of technical assistance we can offer to institutions seeking to enhance their transparency standards, such as DFIs, MDBs, public development banks, government agencies, and civil society organisations, visit our new technical assistance web page.
New training dates for 2026: An introduction to using international aid and development data
Learn how to find and explore data to answer your aid and development questions with our one-hour training session. It’s free and interactive. Sign up today to gain valuable insights to assist your research, planning, fundraising, advocacy or campaigning work.
Over the course of one hour we’ll introduce you to the leading global open aid dataset – the International Aid Transparency Initiative – and how to access and navigate information on over a million development, humanitarian and climate projects. In 2025, over 200 people from 48 countries joined our training sessions.
The training will be delivered online once a month. For dates and to book your place please click below.
Other news
Here’s a quick roundup of other news and publications we’ve been reading over the last few weeks:
New research into the connectivity of the global aid system has examined ten million transactions from 1967 to 2025. The study by League of Scholars, University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales, and Universita degli Studi di Milano uses IATI data to map connections between 2,456 organisations across 230 countries. It reveals a system that is global in reach but fragmented in structure. The findings offer a new framework for donors to identify strategic and influential partners that accelerate coordination and evidence diffusion across the global network.
ONE Data and The Rockefeller Foundation have announced the Development Finance Observatory will be launched this year. It is an interactive data platform that aims to improve the accessibility of development finance data and reduce data fragmentation, while integrating both financial inflows to and outflows from developing economies. An initial analysis found that over the last decade, China shifted from a net provider of finance for low- and middle-income countries ($48 billion) to a net extractor (of $24 billion). Meanwhile, multilateral lenders stepped up—boosting net financing by 124% and now providing 56% of net flows, or $378.7 billion between 2020-2024. At the same time, private finance virtually disappeared from the development landscape.
Writing in SDG Communicator, Haley Swedlund and Bernhard Reinsberg describe how development communicators can manage the risks that some associate with transparency. The takeaways from their research include:
- Development agencies should communicate with citizens
- People are more likely to support development agencies that are transparent
- Public support for aid is shallow but malleable
- Suspending aid doesn’t reassure people who have heard negative information about aid
The OECD has released its final 2024 development finance statistics, which show that official development assistance (ODA) from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member countries amounted to $214.5 billion, a real terms fall of 6.0% from the previous year. In 2024, net ODA and concessional finance from DAC members, non-DAC countries and multilateral providers totalled $254.8 billion, a 4.5% decrease over 2023 in real terms. As net ODA from DAC countries declined 8.3% to $211.9 billion, ODA from non-DAC providers also fell by 2.7% to $17.98 billion.
The Center for Global Development has analysed aid cuts in the UK and US, following the passing of the new spending bill by US Congress (which includes international affairs spending of more than $50 billion). It finds that Congress is reducing development-related allocations by 23% in fiscal year 2026 relative to the base budget in fiscal year 2024, while the UK government plans a steeper cut of 27% in its 2026/27 budget, and 34% by 2027/28.
A new report from Century International compares data leaks with official reports from previous years to create a detailed tally of the overall cuts to American aid in the Middle East and North Africa funded by USAID and the State Department. It is a task made more difficult due to the US administration shutting down some data reporting websites and a lack of updated, accurate data from the State Department on current and former projects. The report finds that programme funding has been drastically reduced in almost every sector and country in the region, with exceptions carved out for security-related funding, especially in Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. It says this signals a shift in position and a foreign policy that prizes force and narrow alignment over long-term stability, rights, and human development.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ new Global Humanitarian Overview 2026 (GHO) reports that humanitarian aid fell sharply in 2025. The GHO shows that in 2025, just $20.5 billion of funding was received for humanitarian action, compared to $37 billion in 2024 and $43.3 billion in 2022. The bulk of the cuts came from the US – traditionally, the largest humanitarian donor – which in 2025 provided $2.5 billion of funding, 21% of the total, compared to $11 billion in 2024, or 45% of the total. Other donors who reduced funding included France, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.
Transparency International has launched the Corruption Perceptions Index 2025, which ranks 182 countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. The results are given on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). It finds that while 31 countries have significantly reduced their corruption levels since 2012, the rest are failing to tackle the problem – they have stayed stagnant or got worse during the same period. The global average has fallen to a new low of 42, while more than two-thirds of countries score below 50. Transparency International warns of a decline in leadership in tackling corruption, with established democracies such as the US, UK and New Zealand experiencing a drop in performance.
Eye on Global Transparency has published a list of where to send access to information requests for 21 international organisations, along with tips for making requests for documents.
Eurodad has issued a comprehensive examination of how changes to ODA rules have reshaped international aid. It argues that rule changes and deep cuts have fundamentally altered both what aid is and whose interests it prioritises, moving ODA away from its core purpose of supporting development in the Global South. It calls for an overhaul of the aid system through an inclusive, transparent and democratic process that fully involves Global South countries, civil society and all development actors as equal partners.
Bond has responded to news that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is considering the future of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) – which monitors the UK’s aid spending. Bond has warned of the risk that transparency and accountability will decline without ICAI’s scrutiny. Meanwhile, Center for Global Development has reviewed the value of ICAI and argues that it should be improved rather than scrapped.
A new brief by Open Government Partnership, Transparency International, and the National Democratic Institute examines the problem of debt confidentiality clauses in public debt instruments. It counters six common justifications for secrecy in sovereign lending and offers recommendations for creditors, borrowers, and the international community to improve debt transparency.
The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) has welcomed the reauthorisation of the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) including steps toward improved transparency. But MFAN also raised concerns about some aspects of the bill, such as allowing DFC to make certain investments in very wealthy countries.
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