In anticipation of their upcoming Ownership Paper, Oxfam America have emphasised ‘the need to transfer information, capacity, and control of development assistance to recipients’ as a crucial step towards effective development. Highlighting the words of development leaders across the world, Oxfam America’s Aid Effectiveness Team focused on the three factors – information, capacity, and control, as the driving force towards effective country ownership of aid.

Former Republican member of the US House of Representatives, Mark Green, has called on his former colleagues to embrace the new aid reform bills introduced by the Foreign Relations Committee in both the House and Senate.

The Department for International Development (DfID) has released their new Project Information database. The database, which comes in response to DfID’s 2009 White Paper promise, aims “to improve aid transparency in line with the commitments made through the International Aid Transparency Initiative”.

Press Release

Publish What You Fund

The Global Campaign for Aid Transparency

www.publishwhatyoufund.org

Digital Britain Report, one of the central policy documents in the Government’s Building Britain’s Future plan, has noted the need to “deliver a single online point of access for all UK datasets [and] bring forward specific proposals to make public data more accessible and useful”.

The report recommended the creation of a data service, akin to the US data.gov website which ‘will expose Government feeds in a well-ordered and useful way”.

A report on US Aid to Pakistan has identified the lack of aid transparency as a major factor undermining the effectiveness of US military and development efforts in Pakistan.

The report comes as a first attempt to present “an overview of US aid to Pakistan, evaluate it, and present recommendations on how to ensure that mistakes are not repeated and lessons learned” from its previous lack of aid monitoring and co-ordination in the country.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation have published a new assessment paper in a self-analysis of their aid effectiveness levels.

The assessment, Can Aid Agencies Follow Best Practices?, was based on the work of Easterly and Puftze who, in their 2008 paper: Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid, created a framework for assessing the performance of foreign assistance institutions which includes aid transparency practices.