Ahead of tomorrow’s launch of the 2024 Aid Transparency Index, George Ingram, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution has been investigating exactly what you can find out with International Aid Transparency Initiative data.
Ideally, all aid organisations would publish detailed information about their programmes, spending and impact, allowing us full visibility of the aid delivery network. But there are hundreds of thousands of aid organisations around the world, and only 230 agencies (albeit the biggest ones) regularly publish data in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. So, with such a mountain to climb, and limited resources, where should the IATI community focus its efforts? Alex Tilley looks at who is currently publishing IATI data and considers the pros and cons of supporting all those organisations funding and implementing aid projects to publish data, versus just the largest.
More organisations are now publishing more aid and development data, with richer detail than ever before. And more tools are being produced to enable a broader group of people with different interests to access the data. All this effort is not in vain. Elma Jenkins has been digging into the detail of exactly how open aid data is now being used and highlights some of the creative ways it is supporting research, policy and development practice.
The Bond Transparency Working Group has been collaborating with the FCDO to push for more and better transparency in the UK aid budget. They have been successful in updating the UK’s aid transparency commitment. In this blog, Elma Jenkins looks at what this means for the UK’s aid transparency and where more work is still needed.
We’ve been analysing the transparency of private aid contractors. These organisations handle billions of dollars of aid money, yet the largest players are almost completely un-transparent. This limits both accountability and the scope for analysis of international aid flows. We take a deep dive into the transparency of two of these companies, Chemonics and Adam Smith International, and provide clear policy recommendations to help improve the visibility of the aid that flows through them.
In this roundtable event we are pleased to launch our new Improving funding transparency for women’s economic empowerment report. Our presentation synthesises our work from the last two years, extrapolating findings from across the three focus countries to unpack the current state of transparency in funding for women’s economic empowerment. We identify the key data limitations, including our ability to understand the impact of funding, and provide recommendations for funders to improve the reporting and publication of information to these areas. The roundtable, which took place on 15 December 2022, provided an opportunity for specialists in the field to give feedback on our findings and discuss future actions.
