Development Finance institutions Archives

Making additionality count: Why development finance institutions must step up on transparency

By Ella Remande-Guyard | Apr 16, 2025 | Blog

As more public finance is channelled to the private sector in the name of development, we need to know: are these investments genuinely adding value, or are they just substituting what the market could do on its own? This is where additionality comes in: the idea that ODA should only be used when it delivers something that private capital cannot.
Our latest research explores how well donors and their bilateral DFIs are disclosing the additionality of their private sector instrument (PSI) investments using the new OECD-DAC reporting requirements.

Expanding transparency beyond Official Development Assistance

By Sally Paxton, George Ingram and Guest | Mar 28, 2025 | Blog

As traditional aid shrinks, non-ODA financial flows are increasingly crucial. Their transparency, however, lags far behind. In this blog, Tessie San Martin, George Ingram and Sally Paxton assert that better visibility into non-ODA flows will unlock smarter investments and stronger outcomes. Therefore, extending transparency is essential to ensure new development funding achieves real impact

A common thread for scaling development finance: transparency

By Sally Paxton and Guest | Nov 13, 2024 | Blog

Following the World Bank Annual Meetings, and amidst negotiations for the replenishment of the International Development Association, Sally Paxton and Nancy Lee sift through some of the issues holding back the scaling of public and private resources. They find a common thread – transparency – and argue that multilateral development banks should be using the power of their own data to help fill the information gaps that stand in the way of progress.

Watch now – What we don’t know can hurt us: Better measurement and disclosure of MDB private finance mobilisation data

By Sam Cavenett | Oct 24, 2024 | Events

Catch up on our event discussing our recommendations to strengthen mobilisation measurement and disclosure, and the challenges that need to be resolved in order to make and track more mobilisation progress.

Transforming our understanding of what works to mobilise private investors

By Sally Paxton and Gary Forster | Oct 16, 2024 | Blog

Ahead of next week’s World Bank Annual Meetings, Sally Paxton discusses the critical role of development banks in mobilising private capital to meet global development goals, and why we still don’t understand what is working. She presents new recommendations from Publish What You Fund to fill the current knowledge gap by improving the measurement and disclosure of private capital mobilisation, and stresses why action is urgently needed.

DFI Transparency Index 2025: updated methodology and timeline

By Paul James | Aug 15, 2024 | Blog, News

Work on the second DFI Transparency Index is underway, in preparation for launch in July 2025. The Index ranks the transparency of the world’s leading development finance institutions (DFIs) and encourages improvement. We recently completed a methodology review, involving stakeholder consultation, to improve the rigour of the DFI Transparency Index, while maintaining comparability between the 2023 and 2025 editions. Here we set out the changes that have been made to the methodology, including the addition of new climate finance indicators.