France is pushing forward its transparency agenda, by publishing information on its aid spending in Mali last week.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the French Development Agency (AFD) became the first French agencies to publish data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the agreed common standard for publishing information about spending on development.

We welcome this initial publication and look forward to France continuing to publish information on its development spending for its selected priority countries during the course of 2014.

The IATI standard is designed to ensure data on aid is timely, comprehensive, accessible and comparable. These are all crucial, as only then can donor aid spending be mapped and properly aligned with the recipient country’s domestic budget.