UK Prime Minister, David Cameron on June 13 stressed the importance of aid transparency in a speech to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation conference.

“Incredible as it may seem, just 12 months ago government did not publish details of how our development money was spent.  We’ve changed that.  Today, people all around the world can go online and see every item of DFID spending over £500 and see evaluations of the impact of that spending.  Over the next 12 months, we’ll go even further.  From the beginning of the next financial year, any NGO that receives funding from the UK must publish what they do, where they get their money and where it goes.  This will enable people in the developed and developing world to hold them to account for the way they spend their money and, over time, we will apply this principle to recipient governments too.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we’re shining the spotlight on aid funding like never before.”

The UK are signed up to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), and were the first donor to publish their aid information to the IATI registry. We hope that the UK’s Department for International Development continues to urge other donors around the world to publish their aid information to the IATI standard so that their aid information is not only transparent, but also comparable with others.

Read the full speech here.