The Central American Bank for Economic Integration and Publish What You Fund have announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding, marking a strategic step toward strengthening the Bank’s transparency and institutional openness.
Our regular roundup of news on aid and development transparency – with the missing MDB climate finance project data, a review of 2025, details of our research to map funding to end child marriage, plus a range of new reports and stories from across the sector.
2025 has been a turbulent year for international development. Aid budgets shrank, climate finance demands surged, and political pressure on development agencies – particularly in the United States – intensified. Against this backdrop, at Publish What You Fund we redoubled our efforts to defend open data, strengthen transparency norms, and equip policymakers, civil society and citizens with the information they need to protect development effectiveness. The core pillars of our new strategy – to make aid transparency bigger, better and louder – shaped our interventions throughout the year, from climate finance to localisation to development finance. Here we round up our key activities and achievements.
Multilateral development banks (MDBs) play a central role in the provision of climate finance for emerging and developing economies, yet questions remain about where their billions are going and how effectively they are being used. Publish What You Fund is today launching a new report and accompanying dataset, Behind the Billions: tracking the missing pieces of MDB climate finance data. The dataset is the first cross-MDB repository compiling all publicly available, project-level climate finance data disclosed by MDBs between 2021 and 2023.
Our regular roundup of news on aid and development transparency – with details of the participants for the 2026 Aid Transparency Index, the transparency of the UK’s aid beyond the FCDO, a transparency win that may unlock $600bn of MDB capital, and an update on DFI climate finance transparency.
We are pleased to announce the organisations that have chosen to participate in the 2026 Aid Transparency Index. The Index will provide an independent assessment and accreditation of transparency performance, ensuring the sustainability of this vital global accountability tool while opening participation to a broader range of organisations than ever before.
