In this guest blog, Nora O’Connell and Tessie San Martin discuss the difficulties of tracking foreign aid spent on promoting gender equality, due to the lack of a consistent and accurate way for donors to “tag” funds dedicated to gender. They explain why Save the Children US and Plan International USA are supporting work by Publish What You Fund and Friends of Publish What You Fund to tackle the gender aid data gap.
Our work to increase the transparency of development finance institutions (DFIs) is off to a great start; with the support of an expert group of advisors, we have selected the five key focus areas for our work over the next 2.5 years. Rob Mosbacher, former CEO of OPIC, has chaired the first meeting of the Project Advisory Board that will guide the direction of our DFI Transparency Initiative.
The Publish What You Fund team has so far checked over 6,000 pieces of data published by 47 aid donors, and we’re only halfway through the Aid Transparency Index process. In this blog Elma Jenkins discusses why quality checks are essential for the Index and why, whether you’re looking for an Italian restaurant or details on aid projects, we all need data we can trust.
In the run up to the OECD Private Finance for Sustainable Development conference we ask whether ten years from now, when progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is tallied, we’ll be able to measure the contribution made by Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) and the private finance they’ve mobilised.
Throughout 2019 we have been conducting a transparency review of 10 UK government departments and two cross-government funds. As these departments have come to understand the details of our methodology, learn about the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard and invest in the systems and processes to enable greater transparency, there has been a steady increase in the number of departments providing data, and the comprehensiveness of this data. Consequently there is now a lot more information freely available on UK aid spending which until as recently as August was simply not available. In a new blog, Elma Jenkins reflects on the newly available data, what it tells us about UK aid spending and the many questions it raises.
We are launching a new 2.5 year initiative to increase support for the transparency of Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). It follows a 12-month scoping exercise, and we’re now embarking on a focused, strategic programme to move things forward. Based on our initial research, and the previous work of academics, practitioners and policy-makers, we have set out a collaborative, evidence-based approach that we believe can inform and improve DFI transparency, accountability and decision-making.
