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Archive: Oct 2013

WATCH: London Launch of the ATI

On 1 November, we presented the findings of our 2013 ATI at the Open Government Partnership summit in London.

Watch it now:

Opening up aid flows: progress with implementing a common information standard

Ellen Miller, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation – facilitator

David Hall-Matthews, Managing Director, Publish What You Fund

John Adams, Head of IT and Innovation, Department for International Development

Oluseun Onigbinde, Co-Founder and Lead Director, BudgIT

Jan Mattsson, Executive Director, UNOPS, Secretariat of the International Aid Transparency Initiative

 

Ingram: A big hurrah to the MCC
A man guards sacks of food at a food distribution centre as special envoys and diplomats arrive for a meeting to discuss the progress of a peace treaty in Darfur, at Shangli Tobay village in North Darfur (REUTERS/ Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah).
A big hurrah to the MCC and congratulations to Treasury and USAID!  
The Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC, is to be celebrated, not just for leading the American pack, but for coming in first in the overall global rankings.  The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Treasury Department are to be congratulated for showing significant improvements since 2012.
The Department of State, Department of Defense and the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) clearly have a lot of catching up to do.At the policy level, the commitment and leadership of the Obama administration—through several White House directives  instructing all agencies to embrace open government and open data that is machine readable and readily usable—has been superb.
It has demonstrated it understands the value of making U.S. assistance data publicly available through the innovative Foreign Assistance Dashboard and subsequent agreement to join the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).Why, and for whom, is making assistance data publicly available so important?  Publicly available data:
  • Helps donors make more informed decisions, manage their programs better and coordinate their aid efforts with other donors’ assistance.
  • Enables recipient governments to know where assistance is going in their country so they can better allocate their own budget resources.
  • Allows citizens to be better informed on government decisions and therefore better able to hold government accountable.
  • Feeds the private sector with a new resource on which to create new business services. Publication to IATI is picking up steam.

Donors accounting for 86 percent of official development finance (ODF) are committed to publishing to IATI by the end of 2015 and those accounting for 69 percent are now reporting some information to the IATI registry.  Only a relatively small number of U.S. civil society organizations, such as Plan USA, have committed to publishing their data to IATI.  A few leading foundations such as Gates and Hewlett have joined IATI as well.

As aid transparency is a departure from business as usual (the typical opaqueness of government), the initial decision to make U.S. assistance data publicly available was not an easy one, and the Obama administration deserves due credit.  With more than 25 U.S. government agencies involved in providing assistance, implementation, despite considerable effort, has been more difficult.  This is where attention now needs to double down.

In the first three years of the dashboard, a mere five agencies—USAID, MCC, State, Treasury and Defense—have posted only partial data.  They were joined just this week by the African Development Foundation.  Where is the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Agriculture and data-driven PEPFAR?  Where is activity level data, so that users can determine where and how the aggregate level assistance is being used?  Where are the links to planning and evaluation documents?

The U.S. has pledged full implementation of its commitment to IATI by 2015.  At the current pace it likely will miss that goal.  The MCC and Treasury, admittedly with more simplified data sets, have demonstrated that compliance with IATI is possible.  USAID has also provided evidence of the results of good effort.

There are three problems.  One, most agencies have not made their data public, either to the dashboard or to IATI.  Two, the U.S. has not committed to providing data for some of the most relevant IATI fields, such as activity budgets and results and links to project and performance documents, although agencies have the data and can publish it.  MCC has done so already.  Three, the current process for posting U.S. data to the IATI registry is for the data to first go to the dashboard.

However, data that agencies are providing are not being posted to the IATI registry in either a timely fashion or in complete, data rich form—the dashboard is not using the International Aid Transparency Initiative’s XML format but, rather, spreadsheets that lose some of the detail of the data.

The U.S. can fulfill its obligations through three steps:

  • Establish precise plans and timetables for each agency to publish its assistance data to the dashboard and IATI.
  • Provide data for the full range of IATI fields, including data at the activity level and on results, as the MCC has done.
  • Allow full data sets to be posted to IATI.  There are two alternatives for accomplishing this goal. One, the dashboard can adopt the IATI standard.  Alternatively, eliminate the requirement that agencies send their data through the dashboard.  Accept the fact that the dashboard is valuable for what it was originally designed for—collecting and presenting U.S. assistance data—and remove it as a hindrance to agencies publishing their data directly to IATI.

Finally, nongovernment aid providers and implementers need to step up and join the transparent data era.  In this day, opaqueness should be a thing of the past for all of us.

George Ingram
2013 ATI: MORE IS NOT ENOUGH WHEN IT COMES TO AID INFO

LONDON – Information about aid spending is steadily becoming more available, but it also needs to become more useful, concludes a report released today by Publish What You Fund.

The results show there is a leading group of organisations that publish large amounts of useful information on their current aid activities. For the first time, a U.S. agency – the Millennium Challenge Corporation – ranks top, scoring 89%, more than double the average score.

The Aid Transparency Index (ATI) report is the industry standard for assessing foreign assistance transparency among the world’s major donors. For the first time, it not only assesses what information is published, but also the usefulness of that information.

For example, a donor that publishes budgets in PDFs is more transparent than one that does not publish them at all – but that information is of limited usefulness, because a PDF is hard to access, analyse and reuse.

Although the world’s largest and most influential providers of aid reaffirmed their commitment to transparency this year – at the G8 and as part of the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals framework – more than a third of the organisations ranked still score less than 20%.

This includes large donors, such as France and Japan, which have committed to implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the only internationally agreed standard for publishing aid data that seeks to make it easier to access, use and understand.

David Hall-Matthews, Director of Publish What You Fund, said:

“Open data and transparency are becoming fashionable watch words, but we’re checking if donors are really delivering, looking beyond high-level commitments and long-held reputations. The ATI ranking shows that no matter how many international promises are made, no matter how many speeches there are around openness, a startling amount of organisations are still not delivering on their aid transparency goals.

“We will continue to encourage organisations to release more data – but more is not enough. We also want to make sure that the information is useful.”

Several governments and organisations, including the African Development Bank, Canada, the European Commission, GAVI, UNDP, UNICEF and the U.S. Treasury have made big improvements this year, by publishing more information in accessible and comparable formats.

China comes last, making it the least transparent of the 67 organisations that were assessed in 2013.

The top 27 agencies all publish at least some current information to the agreed IATI standard. Because the data is published in the most open and comparable format, it is easier to access, and also more useful. Organisations receive lower scores for publishing in less useful formats such as PDFs or hard-to-navigate websites, or for not publishing the information consistently.

To see all the findings of the 2013 ATI, please visit: http://ati.publishwhatyoufund.org

 

/ Ends

 

Contact:          Nicole Valentinuzzi T: +44 (0)7726 831 197 / + 1 (202) 834 7055

nicole.valentinuzzi@publishwhatyoufund.org

 

Notes:

 

  1. Publish What You Fund is the global campaign for aid transparency, advocating for a significant increase in the availability and accessibility of comprehensive, timely and comparable aid information. The organisation monitors the transparency of aid donors in order to track progress, encourage further transparency and hold them to account.
  2. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has 33 signatory donors committed to publishing to its common standard. These donors account for over 85% of Official Development Finance (ODF).
  3. On Thurs 24 Oct at 1530 EST, watch the 2013 ATI launch here: http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/2013-index-livestream/

 

 

 

Global Transparency Week

Global Transparency Week - logo - high res

Global Transparency Week is now over, but here is what all the fuss was about.

Global Transparency Week is a series of events focusing on transparency, accountability and good governance.

It starts on October 24 in Washington D.C., with the launch of the Aid Transparency Index (ATI), and finish with the Open Government Partnership conference in London on October 31, 2013.

The international events are hosted by organisations and campaigners interested in raising the profile of transparency in the diverse sectors we cover, and the commitments of countries towards increased openness in those sectors.

Global Transparency Week will bring together transparency campaigners for one week, in five different countries, to add to the strength of our collective voice.

Get involved!

See the Global Transparency Week timetable for more details on events.

Conversations in aid transparency

We talked about aid transparency with three equality campaigners in Sudan: Zuhal Ahmed Fadl,  Neimat Abubaker-Abas and May Abd Elnasir.

In this clip they discuss why better information from donors would make impact their work, and react to Aid Transparency Index.

‘Format matters’

Jay Bhalla is the co-founder and executive director for the Open Institute, a global think/do tank of domain experts that provides advisory and technical services in the Open Data and Governance space.

In this clip, he discusses why the format of published aid data matters so much.

Read more about how format matters in the 2013 ATI.

The Make Aid Transparent Campaign

WATCH more about the Make Aid Transparent campaign.

Aid makes a real difference. It can save lives, put kids into school, and reduce poverty and suffering. But at the moment no one knows exactly how much money is being spent, where or on what. In most cases, not even governments receiving aid have a full picture of where all the money goes. This undermines aid’s potential and its effectiveness. With more information, citizens in both donor and recipient countries could know whether aid money was having the best possible impact.

As citizens we have a right to know how aid money is being spent. At a time when public budgets are under pressure and the effectiveness of international aid is being scrutinised, increased transparency is an easy win that could deliver a huge boost to poverty reduction, without needing more money.

Click here to sign the petition, and find out more about the campaign.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has been set up by a group of leading international development organisations, with the aim of making information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand.

Launched in September 2008 at the Accra High Level Forum on Aid
Effectiveness, this pioneering initiative brings together donors, developing
countries and civil society organisations to help donors and their partners
meet their Accra Agenda for Action commitments on aid transparency.

After widespread consultation, IATI has decided to do this by:

  • developing common standards to determine what information participating donors will publish, as well as the format in which the information will be presented
  • setting up an on-line registry that will record the location of information about the aid that participating donors have decided to provide

What does the initiative do?

The IATI standard provides universal project classifications and definitions,
so that citizens, governments, parliamentarians and people working in the
development community can find out:

  • how much money is being provided each year
  • when it was, or is, due to be paid out
  • how funds are expected to be used

Donors choose their own systems for collecting and publishing information. But a new central registry will make it possible for people to find information quickly and easily because it will tell users exactly where the information they need has been published.

Organisations only need to publish their aid information in one place and one format, but many different users will be able to access the information they need and use it for their own diverse purposes.

This widens access to aid information and result in more openness and accountability. It will be easier to monitor aid effectiveness and will thus help to accelerate poverty reduction.

Download our 1-page fact sheet

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