Welcome to our latest roundup of news from the aid and development transparency world.

Your step by step guide to tracking funding for women’s economic empowerment and women’s financial inclusion

We’ve produced two new guides for anyone wishing to track international funding for women’s economic empowerment (WEE) or women’s financial inclusion (WFI) in their own country. The guides are based on an approach we’ve developed and tested over the last two years, designed to be used and adapted by decision makers, researchers and advocates for their own purposes – including holding funders accountable or advocating for different investments. The new step by step guides are concise, accessible and flexible – signposting to a range of other, more detailed resources. View the guides here.

In this blog, Alex Farley-Kiwanuka and Sally Paxton describe how we developed our approach and what’s included in the guides.

And look out for our global transparency report, coming out before the end of this year, which will synthesise the findings from our Women’s Economic Empowerment project to produce evidence–based recommendations for funders to improve their collection and publication of related information.

Full disclosure: Improving DFI transparency

Our CEO Gary Forster recently joined the Devex event on the Future of Development Finance – speaking about our work to drive improvements in the transparency of development finance institutions (DFIs), why we’re about to produce a DFI Transparency Index and what we’ve found so far. You can catch up on the discussion with panelists from Transparency International and US International Development Finance Corporation below.

Join us at IATI’s Virtual Community Exchange

We’ll be showcasing four areas of our work at the International Aid Transparency Initiative’s Virtual Community Exchange, taking place online on Thursday 10 November. Join us to hear more about how we’re using IATI data to analyse finance for climate, localisation, development finance institutions and women’s economic empowerment. The full agenda is here and you can register here.

The financing and costing of comprehensive care systems

We recently presented our findings on the funding of unpaid care work at this online event organized by UN Women with the Global Alliance for Care. The event focused on recent research on the financing and economic impact of comprehensive care systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. You can watch a recording of the event (in Spanish), featuring Alex Farley-Kiwanuka, here.

Other news

Here is a brief roundup of what we’ve been reading over the past few weeks:

CONCORD has released the 2022 AidWatch report, which monitors the quantity and quality of EU Official Development Assistance (ODA). It notes that since the first AidWatch report in 2005, the EU has failed to meet internationally agreed-upon ODA targets. In 2021, the EU’s ODA was only 0.48% of its Gross National Income (GNI) – a slight decline from 0.50% in 2020, and a long way short of its 0.7% target. CONCORD found that in 2021, 16% of all EU ODA was ‘inflated aid’ – which includes first year costs of receiving refugees in the donor country, interest repayments on concessional loans and the donation of in-excess COVID-19 vaccines. CONCORD calls for the EU and its members to focus more on supporting least developed countries, gender equality, climate finance and civil society organisations.

The Climate Policy Initiative has released its latest Global Landscape of Climate Finance, marking a decade of the report, which monitors global primary investment by public and private actors in activities that reduce emissions and improve adaptation and resilience to climate change. It finds that the past decade saw growing momentum, where public and private climate finance almost doubled between 2011 and 2020. However, reaching climate objectives will require climate investment to increase at least seven times by the end of this decade as well as the alignment of all other financial flows with Paris Agreement objectives. Its preliminary estimates suggest 2021 climate finance flows amounted to USD 850 – USD 940 billion, representing a 28% – 42% increase from 2019/20 averages.

Donor Tracker has published several pieces of analysis on financing climate change adaptation, including donors’ commitments and priorities, climate finance gaps and barriers, and ODA for agriculture adaptation. The insights aim to assist those at COP27 with evidence-based advocacy.

The Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI) has launched a library on Participatory Strategy, containing new guidance and case studies on how to engage partners and recipients in setting transparent, participatory and accountable funding strategies.

This Lowy Institute article considers how Beijing has taken steps to increase its influence in the Pacific Island region at the same time as its aid levels decline. It reviews high profile commitments made by China in the light of data from the 2022 Pacific Aid Map.

Bloomberg has analysed the use of ‘opaque’ donor advisory funds by US foundations which it says allows them to gain tax benefits while delaying giving away any money.