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Archive: Nov 2013
Watch this video by Open For Change.
For immediate release: Wednesday 23 October
Campaigners highlight transparency with week of global events
A series of high-profile events to highlight the importance of transparency for development, innovation, equitable growth, and poverty reduction will begin tomorrow. The first ever Global Transparency Week (October 24 – November 1) is taking place at a time when public interest in government and corporate transparency has never been higher.
Hosted by twenty-two organisations, the week will demonstrate how global the movement for transparency has become: with organisations from Washington, Kabul, Geneva, Ottawa and London participating.
Global Transparency Week will start with the launch of the Aid Transparency Index in Washington on October 24, and finish with the Open Government Partnership summit in London from October 31 to November 1.
David Hall-Matthews, Managing Director at Publish What You Fund said: “Global Transparency Week brings together campaigners from all over the world to unite and compare efforts to drive openness, accountability and transparency for social good. With the community of transparency campaigners growing every year, we hope this is just the beginning.”
Robin Hodess, Director of Advocacy and Research at Transparency International said: “Global Transparency Week demonstrates the strong commitment worldwide to make openness a universal principle. When governments and companies are transparent, they can fight corruption more effectively which in turn benefits more people and provides a development dividend.”
Among the events taking part during Global Transparency Week is a virtual session on mapping global aid. In ‘Towards a Global Open Aid Map’, organized by the World Bank’s Open Aid Partnership and Publish What You Fund, speakers from Washington D.C., Nairobi, Lilongwe, La Paz, and Kathmandu will explore the power of open data to inform development decisions and improve results.
On Monday October 28, the North-South Institute will discuss the importance of open data for development in Ottawa, while GAVI will examine transparency in development funding in Geneva. In London, Thomson Reuters will debate whether open data has failed to live up to its hype. On Wednesday October 30 in London, Clare Short will introduce a series of short films made by Publish What You Pay about the extractives industry.
For full events listing, see http://www.globaltransparencyweek.org.
Ends /
Contacts: Katie Finnegan-Clarke on 07514 751543, katie@publishwhatyoufund.org or Nicole Valentinuzzi on 020 3176 2512, nicole.valentinuzzi@publishwhatyoufund.org.
Notes to the editor:
Participating organsiations: Aid Data, BOND, Development Initiatives, Engineers Without Borders, Gavi Alliance, HEC Paris, Integrity Action, Intergrity Watch Afghanistan, mysociety, ODI, ONE, Open Aid Institute, Open Aid Partnership (World Bank), Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Government Partnership, Publish What You Fund, Publish What You Pay, Sunlight Foundation, Technology Salon, The North-South Institute, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Transparency International.
For more information visit www.globaltransparencyweek.org
The full list of events is available online at http://globaltransparencyweek.org/events/
Interviews available with participating organisations. Contact the numbers above.
The world’s largest and most influential providers of aid reaffirmed their commitment to transparency this year. A UN panel advising on the framework to follow the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) called for a “data revolution”, and G8 members specifically committed to implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the only internationally agreed standard for publishing aid information.
Transparency is a key pillar of sustainable development, an essential piece of the puzzle to enable effectiveness, accountability and social change. In recent years, information on aid spending has slowly become more available and open. But turning transparency promises into reality can be hard.
The Aid Transparency Index (ATI) is the industry standard for assessing transparency among the world’s major donors. The ATI holds agencies to account for the delivery of their aid transparency promises, while also encouraging progress to reach those goals. This year’s results show there is a leading group of organisations publishing large amounts of useful information on their current aid activities.
The top ranking agency is the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), while China takes the last place. The MCC publishes its aid information in the IATI format, right down to results level – in contrast, there is no way to confirm even the total amount of aid provided by China.
What is most troubling, however, is that the average score for all 67 organisations is low. More telling is that 25 of these organisations scored less than 20%. That statistic is clear: no matter how many international commitments are made, no matter how many speeches there are around openness, a startling amount of organisations are still not delivering on their transparency goals.
France is the third largest donor in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), spending over one billion U.S. dollars in 2011. But we could find no comprehensive listing of the country’s current aid activities for DRC – or for any other recipient country.
Similarly, Japan is the second largest donor in DRC, spending over 1.2 U.S. billion in 2011. But their database does not include basic information on the projects it’s funding, such as start or end dates of projects or their current status.
That is over USD 2 billion in aid to DRC – an aid dependent and fragile state – that remains unmonitored. And even from the information we could get, much of it was out of date, patchy and difficult to compare with that of other funders operating in DRC.
It’s not all bad though – France and Japan have both committed to publishing their aid data to IATI by 2015, as part of the G8 commitments, so there is time to correct this poor practice.
Indeed, some donors have made real progress over the past year. It is great that they have released a lot more data – but that is not enough on its own. The development community now needs to make sure the information is as useful as possible. That is why the ATI uses a new methodology this year that assesses not just what information is published, but also the quality of that information.
For example, publishing budgets in PDFs is more transparent than not publishing them at all, but it’s not all that useful if the information is hard to access, compare and reuse. Organisations receive lower scores in the ATI for publishing in less useful formats, or for not publishing the information consistently.
In contrast, information published in a standardised, comparable format across all project and activity levels makes it possible to compare different donors’ data. This is incredibly useful. The top 27 agencies all publish at least some current information in the most useful format. Because their data is more useful, organisations publishing in this way score higher in the ATI.
Several governments and organisations, including Canada, GAVI, Germany, UNDP, UNICEF and the U.S. Treasury have made big improvements this year, by publishing more information in accessible and comparable formats. They have effectively leapfrogged others that have not made any significant changes to the amount of information they publish, or publish in less useful formats such as websites or PDFs.
The basic principle that aid information should be publicly available in easy to use formats is now accepted as an essential component of international development – from the debates around the post-2015 framework to the hundreds of commitments made by countries involved in the Open Government Partnership.
Five years ago, when Publish What You Fund began the campaign for aid transparency, the challenge was to get organisations publishing data, in order to demonstrate how people could use this information.
Five years on, the challenge is to increase confidence in this new IATI data by encouraging donors to improve the quality and coverage of their information.
Wide-ranging use of aid information is likely to bolster donors’ resolve in constantly improving the breadth and quality of their publication, as the UK’s Department for International Development has done using IATI data for their new open data portal, the Development Tracker. Understanding how and why people use aid information will continue to be a goal for all development actors, and will mean working closely with diverse partners to make a real difference.
I’m delighted that there is a lot more data out there – now we must make it a useful weapon in the fight to end poverty.
- Dr David Hall-Matthews, Managing Director of Publish What You Fund.
As part of Global Transparency Week 2013, the Open Aid Partnership and Publish What You Fund held a ‘Lightning Talks’ event, where speakers around the globe gave a series of short presentations demonstrating the power of using open development data to inform decisions and improve results.
The speakers in La Paz, Lilongwe, Nairobi, Kathmandu, Washington DC, and other locations connected through Hangout On Air and their lightning talks (short, 5-minute presentations) were followed online by anyone. Successful examples of aid transparency were showcased, with a focus on the geography of aid as well as country-owned data reported by partner governments.
These were all the speakers and topics, and where in the video you can see them speaking:
World Bank Group: Welcome & Introduction (0-2 min)
Marie Sheppard, Practice Manager, Innovation Labs
Rachel Winter Jones, Senior Communications Officer & Moderator
Open Aid Partnership: Putting Development on the Map (2-8 min)
Johannes Kiess, Operations Officer & Pernilla Näsfors, Development Data Specialist
Publish What You Fund: The 2013 Aid Transparency Index and Geographic Data (8-11 min)
Mark Brough, Aid Information Advisor
Bolivia: Bolivia Open Aid Map (13-16 min)
Viviana Caro Hinojosa, Minister of Development Planning, Plurinational State of Bolivia
Video: http://bit.ly/18f3tfM
Kenya: Kenya Open Aid Map (16-22 min)
Peter M. Kamau, Assistant Director, National Treasury, Government of Kenya
Q&A (22-26 min)
Honduras: Increasing Demand of Aid Information (27-31 min)
Hector Corrales, Director of International Cooperation, Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation
Nepal: Nepal Aid Management Platform & Open Nepal Initiative (36-43 min)
YouTube video: http://youtu.be/2Ej-P9xROck
Madhu Kumar Marasini, Joint Secretary, IECCD, Ministry of Finance
Hum Prasad Bhandari, Information, Communication & Documentation Officer, NGO Federation of Nepal
Krishna Sapkota, Executive Director, Freedom Forum
Narayan Adhikari, Nepal Country Representative, Accountability Lab
Bibhusan Bista, CEO, Young Innovations (40-43 min)
Colombia: The reality of development cooperation at national and local level: The Colombian Experience (43-51 min)
Juanita Olarte Suescun, General Direction Adviser, Colombian Presidential Agency of International Cooperation
Malawi: Malawi Aid Management Platform and Open Development Policy Workshop (51-56 min)
Elizabeth Dodds, Aid Effectiveness Specialist, World Bank Group
AidData: Contracting and Results Geocoding Pilot in Nepal (0:57-1:03)
Owen Scott, Associate, Development Gateway
USAID: USAID GeoCenter and AidData Center for Development Policy (1:03-1:08)
Shadrock Roberts, Principal GIS Analyst
Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC): Open Data Catalogue and MCC in XML (1:16-1:19)
Alicia Phillips Mandaville, Managing Director, Development Policy
Department for International Development (DFID), UK: Development Tracker (1:19-1:23)
John Adams, Head of Business Innovation
InterAction: NGO Aid Map (1:23-1:27)
Julie Montgomery, Director for Innovation and Learning
Gapminder Foundation: New effort to visualize subnational data (1:30-1:38)
Fernanda Drumond, Development Data Assistant
UNDP: Opening up the United Nations (1:39-1:44)
Mark Cardwell, Chief, Online Communications
CCAPS & Innovations for Peace and Development, University of Texas: Sustaining and Evaluating Aid Transparency (1:58-2:04)
Kate Weaver, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin