Scheduled to open its doors this fall, the new US Development Finance Corporation has some ambitious and welcome goals. George Ingram and Sally Paxton consider the key issues for the new institution to address if it is to set the gold standard for a modern and transparent DFI.
The Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act (FATAA) was passed by Congress in 2016 to require the US agencies involved in implementing foreign assistance to publish detailed country-based information on their activities. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently assessed how well the 22 agencies are complying with the data requirements. Our US representative Sally Paxton and the Brookings Institution’s George Ingram have been analysing the OMB report and conclude that it falls short in a number of ways. In this blog they summarise the gaps and missed opportunities.
We have built several free tools to give IATI publishers easy ways to check and visualise their own data. They provide a great way to assess your data ahead of the forthcoming Aid Transparency Index. This blog provides a summary of what you can do with the Data Quality Tester, IATI Decipher and IATI Canary.
President Trump will soon send Congress his budget for FY 2020. The development community is fully expecting drastic cuts to the proposed foreign aid budget – repeating the FY ‘18 and ’19 scenarios. Over the past 18 months we have conducted detailed research into the impact of proposed cuts. In this blog we reflect on our findings and their significance for the FY 20 budget debate.
The new US Development Finance Corporation provides a rare opportunity to set up an agency from the beginning. We can learn from other development finance institutions (DFIs) as to what worked and what did not. This is an opportunity to reach higher, to innovate more, and to truly set a gold standard for transparency.
In the aid transparency arena, one of the most frequently raised issues concerns data use, and the lack of data users. This blog describes how we used our knowledge and experience to examine this issue – taking a user’s perspective to US International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data.
