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.

Until 2024, the Aid Transparency Index operated as a global public good, was philanthropically funded and focused exclusively on the world’s 50 leading aid organisations. From the 2026 edition onwards, in response to growing demand, the Index will adopt an accreditation-based model. For the first time, it will become a paid-for service, expanding its reach to include a wider range of aid and development organisations. These organisations will have the opportunity to be independently assessed, benchmarked, and formally recognised for their transparency.

To see more on the 2026 Aid Transparency Index please visit the main Index page here: https://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/the-index/

Previously, the Aid Transparency Index assessed 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.