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

Can AI make open aid data accessible to everyone?

For years, accessing raw aid data has required specialist skills – understanding data structures, using download tools, and interpreting complex reporting practices. That has created a reliance on “data intermediaries” to turn data into insights.

Our aid data experts, Elma Jenkins and Alex Tilley, have been testing whether AI agents could bridge that gap by querying raw International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data directly.

Their key findings:

✅ AI was strong at retrieving and analysing data from the source.

✅ It could answer complex questions without users needing technical knowledge of the IATI Standard.

⚠️ However, it struggled with interpretation – missing issues such as incomplete reporting, double counting, and important contextual factors.

⚠️ Accurate analysis still depended on human expertise and external validation.

They concluded that AI agents are powerful research assistants, not replacements for subject matter experts. AI can lower barriers to access, but high-quality data and specialist knowledge remain essential for credible insights.

As AI capabilities improve, the value of open, standardised and reliable aid data will only increase. That’s why, through initiatives such as the Aid Transparency Index, we continue to push for more and better data from aid and development agencies.

Read the blog here

Sign up to be part of the 2028 Aid Transparency Index!

🎉 A big thank you to all those agencies who are participating in the first Aid Transparency Index accreditation scheme. Their commitment to transparency and willingness to prove and improve their openness has ensured that the Aid Transparency Index continues to provide an independent measure of transparency of the world’s major aid and development agencies.

Our Index team is currently busy checking hundreds of documents and data points, in preparation for the launch of the 2026 Aid Transparency Index in November.

And we’re excited to announce that agencies not already part of the accreditation process can now sign up to access pre-Index benefits throughout 2027 and be part of the 2028 Aid Transparency Index. It’s a great opportunity to:

🔹 Demonstrate your leadership and commitment to transparency

🔹 Get an independent, credible transparency accreditation

🔹 Take advantage of expert guidance to improve your transparency

🔹 Promote your achievement

🔹 Benefit from peer learning and training

Find out more about the benefits and what’s involved in our information pack.

And please get in touch if you’d like to discuss your options.

New initiative to boost transparency in public development banks across Latin America and the Caribbean

Publish What You Fund and CAF – Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean are partnering on a new programme to assess and strengthen how public development banks disclose information relating to their institution and the projects they finance.

With over 70 public development banks in the region managing $236 billion in assets, their role in climate finance, infrastructure, and economic growth is only set to expand. This initiative aims to help institutions better demonstrate their value – and enable investors, governments, and citizens to see the difference they’re making.

We’ll be working with a group of banks to deliver:

🔹 A practical Transparency Tool tailored for public development banks

🔹 A compendium of global best practices

🔹 Hands-on support to identify and close transparency gaps

Read more here

DFI additionality disclosure: More boxes ticked, but is value added?

Development finance institutions (DFIs) are playing a more prominent role in efforts to meet climate and development goals. And their activities can now be counted as official development assistance (ODA) if they demonstrate their added value.

So when ODA budgets are under unprecedented pressure, evidencing additionality is essential for showing that scarce public resources are delivering value that markets alone wouldn’t.

A year after our initial investigations, we’ve re-examined how DFIs are meeting OECDDevelopment Assistance Committee disclosure requirements.

We found real progress in how DFIs report additionality: more institutions are reporting and data completeness has improved significantly. But too many disclosures rely on generic labels and templated narratives rather than explaining why a specific investment needed DFI support. We’d like to see more investment-specific, evidence-based narratives that strengthen accountability and build confidence that development finance is making a genuine difference.

In this blog, Ella Remande-Guyard summarises the findings, where progress has been made, and what still needs to change.

Download the paper: Making Additionality Count 2

2027 DFI Transparency Index: Who’s included, when is it happening and what’s changing?

Work is underway on the third DFI Transparency Index – our assessment and ranking of the transparency of the world’s leading development finance institutions.

Following an internal review and external feedback, we’ve updated our methodology – refining our assessment and scoring process.

In this blog, Ella Remande-Guyard sets out:

🔹 The changes we’ve made to enhance the rigour of the Index while maintaining comparability with previous editions

🔹 The key activities leading up to the launch in summer 2027

🔹 Which DFIs will be assessed

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:

The Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in humanitarian action (ALNAP) has published the Global Humanitarian Funding report 2026. It shows an unprecedented contraction in humanitarian funding, resulting in millions of people in crisis without assistance and backsliding on promised reforms. The report states that international humanitarian funding has contracted by almost a third since 2023, falling from US $47.4 billion in 2023 to US $33.3 billion in 2025. A single-year drop of 20% in 2025 places total assistance at its lowest level in a decade. The United States and Germany together account for nearly nine in ten dollars lost last year. Gulf donors, however, have increased their contributions.

The International Budget Partnership (IBP) has marked 20 years of the Open Budget Survey with the publication of the 2025 edition. the Open Budget Survey 2025 provides an independent, comparative assessment of budget transparency, public participation and oversight in 82 countries. Twenty years of data shows that while transparency has improved, with governments publishing more budget information, accountability has not. Global transparency scores have risen 29% since 2008, and nearly every region has made gains. But IBP finds that the harder challenge — ensuring that public money is raised fairly, spent as promised, and reaches the people who need it most — remains unfinished.

Friends of Publish What You Fund has submitted testimony before the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) public hearing on 3 June, focusing on strengthening the transparency, accountability, learning, and impact of DFC’s investments. It recommended that DFC should:

• Publish all project level information to ForeignAssistance.gov and improve data published to DFC’s website
• Hold stakeholder consultations as it considers improvements to the Impact Quotient
• Publish disaggregated data on private capital mobilisation at the project level

AidData has released its Data Asset Inventory, which tracks the most popular and influential data assets used by policymakers, funders, and researchers. It identifies 496 unique data assets published by 230 organisations across 7 sectors: agriculture and food security, disaster and humanitarian response, education, environment, gender, governance, and health. The inventory will feed into future work to track funding for key data assets and assess their resilience and sustainability. AidData is seeking input from those working with data in the development space on the inventory, data assets and their sustainability.

Center for Global Development (CGD) has reviewed India’s international development, the forms it takes and the countries that receive it. It finds that over the past decade, India has provided enough finance to place it ahead of most OECD-DAC providers, and in line with countries such as Australia and Switzerland. It highlights that India has criticised the lack of transparency in others’ provision of finance and suggests it could maximise the diplomatic benefits and set an example by being more transparent about its own finance – through consolidating its data and reporting to IATI.

The Institute for Journalism and Social Change and Harm Reduction International used IATI data to track international aid funding for the war on drugs. Their investigations found that over the decade from 2015-2024, aid donors spent a total of about US$60 million on ‘narcotics control’ projects in 14 countries that retain the death penalty – including Iran, one of the leading executors of people for drug related offences. The report argues that ‘narcotics control’ activities, in death penalty states, directly feed into systems of arrest, prosecution, and execution for drug offences. The report says this figure is likely to be ‘the tip of the iceberg’ due to transparency gaps in donor reporting and it highlights the need for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to publish its spending to IATI. It also calls on the OECD to remove ‘narcotics control’ as a sector for allowable ODA spend.

Matthew Guttentag of the Growth Firms Alliance has posted a roundup of tools developed to track data and evidence on DFIs, blended finance, and catalytic capital. They include the DFI Transaction Dashboard, which aggregates ~16,000 historical and current transactions from 14 major DFIs, and the Growth Firms Alliance Research Explorer, containing ~100 recent research papers related to topics such as non-financial support for firms, blended finance structures, and capital mobilisation.

CGD has revisited its review of childcare investments at multilateral development banks (MDBs) and found that MDBs approved 163 childcare-related projects between 2021 and 2024, totalling more than US$23 billion in financing and grants—but gaps in investment, measurement, and implementation remain.

The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) has launched a new public portal powered by IATI data. The portal aims to transform published IATI data into an accessible resource for citizens, partners and policymakers, helping users explore Spain’s development cooperation activities.

The OECD Development Assistance Committee has launched a new dashboard bringing together data on the tying status of ODA with information on suppliers that have been awarded ODA-financed contracts. It aims to bring greater transparency to the implementation of commitments on tied aid (restricting contracts to suppliers from the donor country) and enables users to compare the share of tied and untied ODA across DAC members and explore procurement data by donor, recipient country, sector and financing instrument.

A blog from Bright Simons of Brookings Institution digs into the figures behind recent reports that Africa’s non-bank capital pools exceed US$2 trillion and finds almost all of that money is already hard at work. They warn that talk of “mobilising the idle trillions” to close Africa’s infrastructure gap could be a costly misunderstanding, and shifting pension money into infrastructure doesn’t create new money.

The Nigerian Senate has adopted a resolution aimed at strengthening the regulation and accountability of foreign aid and grants into the country by passing for a second reading a bill to ensure better coordination and transparency of foreign aid and donations. However some civil society groups have expressed concern over the bill, seeing it as a threat to civic space rather than a pure transparency measure.

The UK’s International Development Committee has criticised the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s (FCDO’s) transparency and accountability after it delayed the release of figures on how much spending it will allocate to individual countries and cut the budget of its watchdog – the Independent Commission on Aid Impact. The FCDO did release its annual report and country allocation figures later in July. Bond has reviewed the figures and highlights significant planned cuts to some low income and fragile and conflict affected countries.

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