The UNECA-OECD 2009 ‘Mutual Review of Development Effectiveness’ (MRDE) has been published and can be read here. The report examines progress made towards commitments both by Africa and within the wider international community. Whilst Publish What You Fund welcomes the fact that the report reiterates the need for greater aid transparency, we also note that the production of such reports would be much easier if donors increased their levels of information disclosure.

In this article, published in the Canadian foreign policy newsletter ‘Embassy’, Danny Howard, director of outreach for the Canadian NGO Engineers Without Borders, stresses the lack of transparency around CIDA’s recent shifts in aid destinations and calls for the government to explain its decisions.

A new Oxfam report on aid to Afghanistan argues that lack of aid transparency is one of the key factors behind aid in the region being wasted or used ineffectively.

Read the report

Click the links below for various materials on the IATI.

General Materials

International Aid Transparency Initiative Statement 4th September 2008

Summary project plan – 28th November 2008

Budget

Scoping paper

Terms of reference for scoping paper – 14th November 2008

The Millennium Challenge Corporation have released an integrated anticorruption policy. Publish What You Fund welcomes an integrated approach, particularly if future iterations would extend to integrating broader aid transparency and effectiveness issues.

Our Director Karin Christiansen presented at the fourth annual Open Knowledge Foundation conference on the 28th of March. The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation promoting open knowledge, which they define as ‘any kind of information – sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata – that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed’.

Click here to access Karin’s presentation.