Welcome to the latest monthly roundup of news from the world of aid and development transparency. This month members of the team have been to Washington DC to launch new proposals to improve the measurement and disclosure of private capital mobilisation, and to Bogota to discuss the current and future trends in aid transparency with the International Aid Transparency Initiative community.

Crowding in: An advanced approach for measuring and disclosing private capital mobilisation

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) and development finance institutions (DFIs) need to scale up private capital mobilisation if we are to close the financing gaps in meeting the SDGs and addressing the climate crisis. As stakeholders seek to reform MDBs, we need to understand what works to mobilise private capital, and in what contexts.

Following discussions with DFIs, shareholders, private sector representatives, and subject matter experts, Publish What You Fund has developed a proposed new approach to the measurement and disclosure of private capital mobilisation. It builds on the existing MDB and OECD approaches and sets out the improvements needed to ensure accountability, learning – and ultimately – to increase the scale of mobilisation.

We have defined a methodology for measuring mobilization that accurately captures the broad range of activities across timelines and aligns with incentives to prioritise the most promising kinds of investments. And, critically, our proposed approach calls for increased levels of disaggregation in mobilization disclosure. We will be consulting on our proposed approach and welcome any feedback before 14 June.

We launched our proposal on 16 April at an event hosted by the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington Dc. You can watch a recording of the launch, featuring speakers from the US Treasury, International Finance Corporation (IFC), ODI and Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), below. Our CEO Gary Forster also co-authored a blog with CGD’s Nancy Lee which sets out the need for better mobilization data to understand what works and where, and how our proposals offer a solution.

See the full report and provide your feedback here

“at the end of the day what we really want is as much capital as possible targeted at addressing the sustainable development goals and that’s why we’re so interested in mobilising private capital and that’s why this effort really takes us a long way.”

Margaret Kuhlow, US Department of the Treasury

Who should publish aid data, and why?

Ideally, all aid organisations would publish detailed information about their programmes, spending and impact, allowing us full visibility of the aid delivery network. But there are hundreds of thousands of aid organisations around the world, and only 230 agencies (albeit the biggest ones) regularly publish data in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. So, with such a mountain to climb, and limited resources, where should the IATI community focus its efforts? Alex Tilley looks at who is currently publishing IATI data and considers the pros and cons of

supporting all aid organisations to publish aid transparency data or just the largest.

Read the blog here

How is open aid data being used?

More organisations are now publishing more aid and development data, with richer detail than ever before. And more tools are being produced to enable a broader group of people with different interests to access the data. All this effort is not in vain. Elma Jenkins has been digging into the detail of exactly how open aid data is now being used and highlights some of the creative ways it is supporting research, policy and development practice.

Read the blog here

Other news

Here’s a quick roundup of other news and publications we’ve been reading over the last few weeks:

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has published preliminary data on ODA provided by members of its Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2023. The data shows ODA rose to an all-time high of US$ 223.7 billion, up from US$ 211 billion in 2022. Development Initiatives (DI) produced this analysis of the figures, highlighting spending on the war in Ukraine, in-donor refugee costs and the impacts of COVID-19. Across all DAC members on average, almost as much aid was spent on in-donor refugee costs (US$31 billion) as on bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa (US$32 billion), or Least Developed Countries (US$33 billion). DI calls for the prioritisation of efforts to cut poverty and inequality, achieve the SDGs and address impacts of climate change.

Research from the ONE Campaign has revealed that the Global South now pays more in debt repayments than it receives in grants and loans. Global net financial transfers to countries in the Global South have fallen to their lowest level since the global financial crisis. The analysis, based on World Bank and OECD data, shows that net financial transfers to countries in the Global South have fallen from their peak of US$225 billion in 2014 to US$51 billion in 2022. New projections show that flows will fall by over US$100 billion in the next two years, which means US$50 billion will flow out of the Global South in 2024. The ONE Campaign is calling for MDB reform, increased investments in low-income countries and expedited debt relief.

Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway have launched the Path to Scale dashboard to aid the transparency of climate finance. The open-source online tool gives easy access to data on donor funding for Indigenous Peoples’, local communities’, and Afro-descendant Peoples’ tenure and forest guardianship. The accompanying brief shows that global climate funding committed to these groups averaged US$517 million per year between 2020 and 2023, up 36 percent over the preceding four years. However, they found no evidence of a systematic increase in direct donor funding to rightsholders’ own organisations.

The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has launched a new website to improve the transparency of its international development cooperation. DevData provides accessible, detailed information on aid spending by country and sector, updated on a monthly basis.

New data from the Global Emerging Markets (GEMs) Risk Database on MDB loan recovery statistics has been welcomed as a step towards greater transparency. The team at CGD has looked into the detail of what has and hasn’t been disclosed. They highlight that the data shows that the regions of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa consistently have the highest recovery rates across the three highly aggregated sectors the report uses. Also, the (very partial) evidence suggests that for loans in default, the risk of losses is actually lower in the poorest countries than in middle-income countries. CGD calls for more regular, robust disclosure of disaggregated GEMs data to support private lending decisions.

Donor Tracker has produced a commentary on a recent court ruling in Germany, its impact on the 2024 federal budget, and the resulting ODA funding cuts for BMZ and AA.

In Scotland the Cross-Party Group on International Development has launched an inquiry on Scottish Government transparency in international development. The inquiry is seeking to explore where and how funds have been committed since the last National Outcomes review, and how this is changing. it will also consider international best practice on aid transparency to assess whether improvements could be made to existing Scottish Government processes.

Bond has reviewed the UK’s provisional aid statistics for 2023. The total ODA budget was £15.37 billion; over a quarter of this (£4.3 billion) was spent in the UK on refugee costs.

Canada has released its Budget 2024, which includes new funding to support Ukraine and bolster Canada’s international humanitarian assistance. Several Canadian development groups praised the government’s commitment to US$254 million in new international humanitarian assistance. However, Cooperation Canada criticised the lack of budget transparency surrounding Canada’s international assistance as well as the absence of any increase in funding for longer-term development funding.

The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) has analysed the US final Fiscal Year 2024 State-Foreign Operations Bill. MFAN raises concerns about the 6% (US$3.7 billion) funding reduction from FY23 levels and the delay in enactment of the bill until already half-way through the year, causing uncertainties in planning and programme management. MFAN says it is troubled by the cut of 2.75% (US$48 million) to USAID’s Operating Expenses but welcomes the inclusion of new language directing the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to “ensure timely, accurate, and complete reporting of DFC investments on the ForeignAssistance.gov website”.

The Tax Justice Network has a new report which looks at how ‘secrecy promoters’ have found a strategy to turn back the clock on transparency advances (e.g. automatic exchange of banking information, beneficial ownership transparency and country by country reporting). It looks at how the rights to privacy and data protection are being used to prevent the public and competent authorities accessing information and addresses the arguments at the heart of privacy-washing.

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