Ahead of the 7 July International Aid Transparency Initiative Steering Committee meeting in Paris, CSOs from around the world urged development ministers to support an aid transparency standard which ensured more effective foreign assistance. On 28 July CSOs sent follow-up letters encouraging IATI signatories to continue their participation in advance of the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in November 2011.
Rajiv Shah, director of the U.S. government’s Agency for International Development, USAID, once more promised major reform of the aid agency in a speech at the National Press Club last Friday, 18th June.
Earlier this month, Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry urged Ambassador Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, to make U.S. objectives, plans and disbursements of aid to Pakistan more transparent.
Chatham House has released a report, ‘Organizing for Influence: UK Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty’, which highlights open data as a necessary component of a much-needed UK foreign policy reform.
The UN Development Cooperation Forum (DCF) has published a background paper in preparation for the DCF High-level Symposium being held in Helsinki on 3–4 June 2010. The paper is a review of progress in international and national mutual accountability and transparency on development cooperation and praises the work of Publish What You Fund. It includes a review of progress on international and national-level mutual accountability and transparency and what should be the next steps taken by the international community to accelerate progress on these issues.
The 2010 EU AidWatch Report was launched this morning in Brussels. Having ‘tracked the EU’s progress towards achieving its aid quantity and quality commitments’, the report states that most donors are yet to adequately address the important issues of aid transparency, conditionality and accountability.
