‘Sufficient, measurable, accountable, responsive and transparent’ – aid should meet these criterion according to ONE’s SMART initiative, which are aligned with the principles of Publish What You Fund. Not only the need for aid, but the necessity of transparency of aid and its delivery are recognised by African leaders fighting against poverty. 

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Project-Level Aid (PLAID) and Development Gateway’s Accessible information on Development Activities (AiDA) are merging their efforts to track development finance and cooperation. The new database, AidData is currently in production and will be launched in the first quarter of 2010. A workshop – Aid Transparency and Development Finance: Lessons and Insights from AidData – will take place in Oxford (UK) in March.

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 Western and Gulf Arab donors want to help Yemen escape the poverty on which Al Qaeda thrives, but new aid will not flow unless President Ali Abdullah Saleh enacts reforms and tackles corruption, diplomats and analysts say. Diplomats claim inefficient bureaucracy and a lack of transparency in tenders have helped clog the aid pipeline.

 137 programmers and software developers filled the offices of Washington’s Sunlight Foundation this weekend. It’s an ad hoc assembly of technology types eager to help out Haiti. People are able to help with aspects of relief from identifying places for the geolocation team, to language translation.

A $10 billion bailout for Dubai from oil-rich Abu Dhabi, announced in December, is actually half that size, a Dubai government spokeswoman said Monday, raising questions about the United Arab Emirates’ plans for playing down Dubai’s mountain of debt. Dubai has been criticized for a lack of transparency around the debt restructuring. In response, it announced earlier this month a new media office to coordinate the emirate’s communications strategy.