Publish What You Fund is the global campaign for aid and development transparency. Since our establishment in 2008, Publish What You Fund has successfully driven increased transparency among aid donors and development agencies. As a small evidenced-based advocacy non-governmental organisation, we have been able to effectively influence some of the largest aid donors in the world to ‘publish more and publish better’.

Our approach is underpinned by:

• An evidenced-based advocacy strategy that has built constructive relationships with donors and other stakeholders to continue to push for quality and accessible aid and development information.
• Robust research, which is open to public scrutiny.
• A collaborative approach, with a strong and growing range of networks and partnerships at international and national level.
• Technical expertise and detailed understanding of aid and development data platforms and standards.

We envisage a world where aid and development information is transparent, available and used for effective and inclusive decision-making, public accountability and lasting change for all citizens. Our 2021-2024 strategy sets out our current goals,  which are based on three strategic pillars:

1. Engaging with data: Collaborating to ensure that actors engage around development data and that this data is used to contribute to improved outcomes and achievement of local, national and global development goals, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
2. Full transparency: Making all aid and development finance data transparent, available and usable.
3. More quality data: Strengthening and extending our research, advocacy and technical expertise to improve the quality and usability of aid and development finance information.

Our focus is on governments and institutions that provide aid and development finance. The scope of this work is growing as more money flows to the private sector, through climate finance and to humanitarian emergencies. We concentrate on the largest providers of aid and development finance as we want the maximum amount of information as possible to be open.

Most of our funding is derived from grant-making foundations who share our values and objectives. A full list of our funders is here. Some of our work is also supported by Friends of Publish What You Fund an independent 501(c)(3) organisation registered in the District of Columbia.

The Aid Transparency Index is the only independent measure of transparency among the world’s leading development organisations. It is a periodic publication researched and produced by Publish What You Fund. The Index tracks and encourages progress towards aid transparency, while holding donors to account.

For the 2022 Index, 50 donors were assessed. Details on the criteria for inclusion in the Index can be found in the

2022 Aid Transparency Index technical paper.

The Index is an interactive process and Publish What You Fund strongly engages with the donor organisations it is assessing. At the beginning of data collection, Publish What You Fund shares a preliminary assessment of each organisation’s level of transparency and remains available throughout and after the data collection period to respond to questions and queries. Additionally, for the first time in 2018, Publish What You Fund provided donors with the Data Quality Tester, a new open source tool that allows organisations to independently test the quality of their data against the Index methodology.

To ensure both the accuracy and impartiality of the Index, independent reviewers also provide feedback, comments and suggestions on assessments. They typically come from CSOs, think tanks or universities familiar with the donor organisation concerned or the development sector more broadly. Further input is provided by a group of peer reviewers, comprised of recognised experts in the development sector and/or on open data. They advise Publish What You Fund on the methodology and related assessments.

The Aid Transparency Index aims to push donors to publish their aid and development information in an open data format. As the global aid landscape changes and donors make progress towards this goal, the methodology has been revised and developed to remain relevant. The Aid Transparency Index methodology was revised for the 2013 Index and again for the 2018 and 2022 Index.

The 2022 Index features some changes to the index methodology. Following an assessement method review, we have updated and re-issued the technical paper incorporating minor adjustments  .

The 2022 Aid Transparency Index technical paper contains a full account of the scoring system and indicator definitions.

More details of the methodology, scoring  and indicator definitions are given on the methodology page

We review the criteria for donor selection before each Index process begins. We assessed 47 donors in 2020 and 45 in 2018. For the 2022 Index we will assess 50 donors. Details of the donors included in 2022 can be found here.

The Aid Transparency Index assesses more than one agency for some large donors (European Commission, France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States and the World Bank) with multiple ministries or organisations responsible for significant proportions of ODA. We have opted to maintain the disaggregation of agencies for several reasons. First, no two agencies from the same donor country or organisation in the Index score the same. There is often wide variation in the amount of information made available by different agencies in a single country or multilateral organisation. Second, agencies often retain a large amount of autonomy in deciding how much information they make available and have different publication approaches, which they should be held accountable for. Third, it would be unfair for high performing agencies within a country or organisation to be pulled down by lower performing agencies. Similarly, lower performing agencies should not have their poor performance masked in an average score. Finally, it is unclear how we can aggregate agencies into a single country or organisation score in a way that reflects wide variations in performance. It would be necessary to take into account the proportion of a country’s aid delivered by each separate agency in order to create an aggregate country ranking that fairly reflects that country’s level of aid transparency and this information is not always available.

No we are not. Publish What You Fund and Publish What You Pay are two independent organisations. We work on aid transparency and Publish What You Pay focuses on transparency in the extractives sector. Publish What You Pay supports the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which shares similar aims to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), but in a different sector.

Manual checks and sampling are conducted by Publish What You Fund staff on 16 indicators published in the IATI Standard. The purpose is to ensure that the information published for these indicators is what it should be and encourages the publication of high quality information to the IATI Registry with the aim of benefiting data users.

Manual checks and sampling are conducted twice: first, as part of the initial assessment; second, at the end of data collection. The results of the first round of manual checks and sampling are shared with the donor organisation, giving them the chance to fix any issues. After data collection has closed, Publish What You Fund will notify donors of sampling results in order that any data errors can be fixed. However, improvements to this data will not be taken into account for the final Index results.

For five indicators relating to organisational planning, Publish What You Fund’s team will manually check that the documents published on the IATI Registry are up-to-date and meet both the requirements of the IATI Standard and the Index indicator definition. A single document is expected for each of the following indicators: organisation strategy, annual report, allocation policy, procurement policy and audit.

For individual projects and operations, 11 indicators are sampled to manually verify that the information provided meets the required criteria and definition against which they are being scored. This includes, among others, project budget documents, reviews and evaluations as well as sub-national locations. Sampling is conducted on 20 current projects and operations. These are randomly selected. A minimum of ten project documents or data need to pass sampling to be scored as IATI data.

For a full list of sampled indicators and more details, please see the2022 technical paper.

Data must be current for an organisation to be able to score on each indicator. For purposes of the Index, “current” is defined as published within the 12-months immediately preceding the end of the data collection period, e.g. “current” information was published between the 9th of March 2021 and the 9th of March 2022. Information published before this period is not accepted as current and information published after the close of data collection cannot be considered in the assessment. Documents that are not current under this definition are accepted only if they are up to date with their regular cycle of publication or if they have explicit extensions written into them.

Information published in machine-readable formats is presented in a structured way (not free text) that can be read automatically by a computer. Formats such as XML or spreadsheets (XLSX, CSV) are machine-readable formats. Data in traditional word-processed documents, HTML and PDF files are easily read by humans but are difficult for machines to interpret. Publishing data in a structured, machine-readable open format allows activities of different organisations to be quickly collected and compared. By contrast, comparing activities across multiple organisations or countries would require searching multiple websites and aggregating information published in different PDF files. This difference is reflected in the Index scoring, whereby organisations can get more points on indicators published in machine-readable formats. Data published in the IATI Standard, the only open standard for aid and development finance data, scores highest, followed by data published in other machine-readable formats, then websites and finally PDF files.

For details on the scores given per format, please see the 2022 technical paper.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard framework for publishing aid and development information. IATI is a ‘multi-stakeholder initiative’ with members including governments, multilateral organisations and civil society groups. The IATI Standard allows funders and implementing organisations to publish their data on aid and development finance in a common format that allows for comparison across organisations. Over one million development and humanitarian activities have been published in the IATI Standard.

Publishing in the IATI Standard requires set information to be disclosed in a standard format, including a project’s title and the type of work being done. Financial and transaction data, such as budgets, commitments and disbursements are also standardised. The advantage of this is that information can be easily understood and compared. It is also timely and can be both current and forward-looking. Aid organisations can also publish more detailed documentation about their projects, including contracts, evaluations and results. Data published in the Standard is open, which means it can be used and reused by anyone and everyone for free.

The IATI Standard is machine readable, so computers are able to quickly download and analyse the data. Importantly, the forward-looking data published in the Standard allows partner countries and organisations receiving aid and development finance to plan their budgets better.

The Aid Transparency Index measures donor progress towards aid transparency and is produced by Publish What You Fund, an independent civil society campaign. The Aid Transparency Index does not only include IATI publishers but also looks at other donors. IATI is an initiative that promotes and maintains an open data standard. Publish What You Fund was an early supporter of IATI, and held one of two civil society seats on the IATI Board until March 2018.

As an organisation we are committed to high internal transparency standards. We publish all of our financial data to the IATI Registry as part of our internal Transparency Policy that outlines our approach to organisational Ethics, Governance and Disclosure of Information. You can see a visualisation of our revenue and expenditure, based on our IATI data here.

Publish What You Fund has conducted the Aid Transparency Index for 10 years. Over this period, seven multilateral development finance institutions (DFIs) have been included in the Aid Transparency Index. While some DFIs have performed well, particularly in terms of their sovereign operations, they have raised the issue that their business models are markedly different from “traditional” aid agencies and as such they struggle to meet some of the transparency criteria set out in the index. In particular, the non-sovereign operations of DFIs differ substantially from “traditional” aid operations. As such, we identified the need for a product that is more tailored to assessing the transparency of their business models.

One key difference between the Aid Transparency Index and the DFI Transparency Index is the extent to which they assess the quality of publication in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. The Aid Transparency Index is significantly focused on publication in the IATI Standard, as this is accepted as the global standard for aid data. Recognising that there are elements of IATI publication that are not relevant to DFIs, and that there are important aspects of DFI activity that cannot currently be published to the IATI Standard, we have adopted a more nuanced approach to assessing DFI transparency. Where possible, the indicators of the DFI Transparency Index are aligned to the IATI Standard and publication to the Standard is incentivised. However, we include numerous indicators that do not specify publication to the Standard.

We recognise that for DFIs included in both the Aid Transparency Index and the DFI Transparency Index the current arrangement may not seem ideal. We have sought to reduce the burden of this arrangement by aligning the indexes to the greatest degree possible, while retaining their individual significance and the logics behind their use. We will continue to assess the relationship between the two indexes over 2022.

Both the DFI Transparency Tool and the DFI Transparency Index have been developed as part of Publish What You Fund’s DFI Transparency Initiative. The initiative is a multi-stakeholder research and advocacy project that aims to improve the transparency of DFIs. We have been researching the current state of DFI transparency and opportunities for improvement since November 2019. The initiative identified the need for a sustainable product that would facilitate and encourage enduring change over time.

The DFI Transparency Tool has two functions. First, it is intended to provide granular guidance to DFIs about the types of information that a range of stakeholders value and that should therefore be disclosed, based on their obligations as publicly owned entities that manage and disburse public money. Second, it forms the basis of future and ongoing assessments of the transparency of DFIs (the DFI Transparency Index).

The DFI Transparency Index will measure, assess, and rank the transparency of leading DFIs against a set of indicators, which were informed by the research behind the DFI Transparency Tool.

Currently, the DFI Transparency Index is part of a pilot phase, which we hope to continue after the DFI Transparency Initiative comes to an end in January 2023. Our intention is to continue running the index on a two-year cycle, recognising that it can take significant amounts of time for DFIs to change practice and policies. However, future indexes are dependent on securing further funding for this undertaking.

Our criteria for determining which DFIs feature in the index is based on the primary mandates of the institutions, their size, the geographic scope of their work, and their suitability for assessment according to current reporting practices. We have developed separate selection criteria for multilateral and bilateral DFIs due to their vastly difference sizes and varying mandates. Our selection has been guided by data from the Finance in Common PDB Database.[1] The criteria are as follows:

Multilateral DFIs (Sovereign and Non-Sovereign)

1. Institutions must have a primary focus on investing in activities with a development objective. Trade finance institutions, including export import banks, are excluded from the assessment.
2. Institutions must have a total asset size over US $15 billion. For DFIs that operate separate institutions under a group, then total group assets may be considered.
3. Institutions must work internationally.
4. Institutions must demonstrate a fundamental commitment to transparency through the maintenance of a database or list of active investments.

Bilateral DFIs

1. Institutions must have a primary focus on investing in private sector activities with a development objective. Trade finance institutions, including export import banks, are excluded from the assessment.
2. Institutions must have a total asset size over US$500 million.
3. Institutions must work internationally.
4. Institutions must demonstrate a fundamental commitment to transparency through the maintenance of a database or list of active investments.

Further details of the DFIs included in the DFI Transparency Index are provided in the methodology.

[1] Xu, Jiajun, Régis Marodon, Xinshun Ru, Xiaomeng Ren, and Xinyue Wu. 2021. “What are Public Development Banks and Development Financing Institutions? Qualification Criteria, Stylized Facts and Development Trends.” China Economic Quarterly International, volume 1, issue 4: 271-294.

The DFI Transparency Index assesses the transparency of DFI lending to financial intermediaries (including funds, banks, and non-bank financial institutions) as well as a subset of financial intermediary sub-investments. At the level of the financial intermediary, DFI investments are treated in the same way as DFI direct investments in other sectors and, as such, the same level of transparency is expected. Reflecting this, DFI investments in financial intermediaries may be included in the samples of projects that we will analyse.

We limit our assessment of financial intermediary sub-investments to a sub-set of total on-lending activity. This is in recognition of the fact that a significant proportion of financial intermediary on-lending targets relatively low risk sectors, including MSME financing and housing finance. With this in mind, we limit our assessment to the disclosure of sub-investments of funds (such as private equity funds) and high risk and/or large on lending activities. We define high risk and/or large as Category A (or equivalent) sub-investments and sub-investments that are larger than the thresholds established by the Equator Principles. The Equator Principles represent an internationally recognised standard for the identification of high-risk financing.

The DFI Transparency Index will assess both sovereign and non-sovereign lending by DFIs. In the case of sovereign lending, this will be limited to leading multilateral DFIs, while assessment of non-sovereign lending will include both multilateral and bilateral DFIs. For multilateral DFIs that conduct both sovereign and non-sovereign activities we will assess each separately.

While we are assessing both forms of lending, our analysis and ranking will separate sovereign and non-sovereign lending. This is a result of our recognition that the two types of lending involve significantly different business models and, as such, necessitate the disclosure of different types of information. As the DFI Transparency Tool varies across the two types of lending, and the DFI Transparency Index includes different indicators in line with the tool, it is necessary to weigh the constituent indicators differently. With this in mind, we will conduct two rankings.

We will be completing the DFI Transparency Index throughout 2022. Our proposed plan of work is as follows:

November 2021 to April 2022

Methodology Development: DFI inclusion criteria and selection for Index, sampling approach, data collection and analysis process, scoring approach, and determination of indicator weightings. We conducted consultations on the methodology in March and made necessary edits during April.

April 2022

Database Building: extracting data from DFI investment lists and databases to identify investments for a set period of time (stipulated in the methodology) from which our samples will be selected at random. The process will exclude investments which do not qualify for assessment based on level of country income and investment size.

May to June 2022

Data Collection and Analysis – First Round: assessment of DFIs’ organisation and project-level disclosure from first sample of fifteen projects. Data will be recorded in a dedicated workbook and supporting document and analysed according to the scoring approach set out in the methodology. This round of analysis will not contribute to the final score of DFIs in the index; it is intended to give DFIs an indication of their performance and to identify areas for improvement before the next round of sampling.

The list of DFIs to be included and the methodology will be finalised and made public in May 2022.

July 2022

DFI Review: first round scores will be sent directly to DFIs in July to give them an opportunity to understand our assessment of their performance and provide feedback on our findings. DFIs will be provided with a granular analysis of their results including their workbooks and a supporting document. DFI feedback will be considered prior to the second round of data collection and analysis.

Independent Review: first round scores will simultaneously be sent to independent reviewers who will review our assessment of DFI transparency. Reviewers will be asked to provide feedback which will be incorporated into the second round of data collection and analysis.

August to September 2022

Data Collection and Analysis – Second Round: assessment of DFI’s organisation and project level disclosure from second sample of fifteen projects. Data will be recorded in a dedicated workbook and supporting document and analysed according to the scoring approach set out in the methodology. This round of analysis will be the only round that contributes to index scores.

October to December 2022

Report Production: DFIs included in the Index will be ranked according to performance and results will be presented in a public report alongside detailed analysis of the assessments.

Late 2022/Early 2023

Launch of report: the Index report will be launched at a public event no later than January 2023.