The Report of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Debt Aid and Trade stresses the importance of coordination between donors, recipient country ownership, and predictability and accountability of aid. Below are the recommendations made in conclusion to the report, with transparency mentions highlighted.
An interesting AidData blog entry uses standardisation of boat signals to explain the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)’s function in the aid transparency agenda. ‘The standard […] is the set of internationally agreed-upon rules that govern the way that ships now all communicate.’ In other words, IATI’s standard is something to get all countries to talk about aid in the same language, and ‘enables data aggregators and other users of aid information to compare and merge aid information to get a clearer picture of the aid world.’
The working paper ‘Budget Institutions and Fiscal Performance in Low-Income Countries’ published in March by the International Monetary Fund constructs a new index that allows for benchmarking against the performance of middle-income countries, across regions, and according to different institutional arrangements that deliver good fiscal performance .
The first ever UK Aid Information Challenge took place last Saturday, 10th April in London at the Guardian newspaper. The aim was to see what would happen when aid data, aid practitioners, and some incredibly clever techies are brought together. Despite the sunshine outside, over 40 people joined us for 7 hours of enthusiastic "barcamping".
Last night, 13th April, saw the launch of ONE’s Vote 2010 Campaign which aims to ‘ensure development priorities are adequately reflected in Government policies from climate change to agriculture to trade.’ The Publish What You Fund Principles are included in the ONE manifesto for International Development, which requests that an incoming government ‘continue t
