EU ministers yesterday agreed a common EU position for the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness at the end of the month.

Publish What You Fund welcomes the Foreign Affairs Council’s position advocating reaffirmation of Accra commitments on transparency from all development partners to publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely aid information. While we welcome the EU’s specific commitment to an EU Transparency Guarantee, we are disappointed that the EU has not been able to lead by example and demonstrate greater ambition by providing concrete and time-bound commitments to deliver on this prior to Busan; either by making clear their commitment to implement IATI by 2015 or by committing to full-disclosure on forward-looking and disaggregated information on aid.

We also welcome the recognition by EU member states of the importance of implementing a common publishing standard based on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and the DAC’s CRS statistical system by 2015 and encourage the EU to ensure that all DAC donors commit to this in the final BOD.

Ministers agreed to disclose all indicative country-specific information in accordance with the OECD/DAC Forward Spending Exercise. However, the Exercise will not solve the problem of predictability as it does not include the level of detail required for partner countries to programme their activities. Donors should disclose forward spending information in line with the IATI standard, which includes project-level information.

Read the EU Common Position for the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.