Aid spending not as high as sceptics say
The brilliant blogger and economist Owen Barder yesterday clarified the total amount of money spent on aid since it began in the 1960s. According to OECD DAC statistics, together donors have given $502 billion ($866 billion in today’s prices) to sub-Saharan Africa; a far cry from the ‘over a trillion’ quoted by aid sceptics, who may be relieved to find out it is in fact only ‘billions’ worth of aid that ‘hasn’t worked’.
Karin Christiansen speaks in Parliament
Today Karin Christiansen, Director of Publish What You Fund, spoke at the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Debt, Aid and Trade (APPG DAT), which has a membership of over 170 MPs and Peers in the UK Parliament and has developed into a forum for discussion on crucial issues facing the developing world.
New paper from AidInfo: ‘Show Me the Money’
We are delighted to see the release of ‘Show Me the Money’, a valuable paper from Aidinfo which considers the issue of transparency in aid and the role that the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) plays.
Doug Hadden looks to aid transparency to tackle corruption
Doug Hadden, Vice President of Products at FreeBalance, asks how corruption might best be understood and tackled in a Sustainable Public Financial Management blog post last week. Hadden starts with the common (if unarticulated) public feeling that recipients are largely responsible for the loss of aid money by corruption.