As the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) takes shape, there is a concerning silence around aid transparency. At a time when transparency is more vital than ever – to ensure that scarce development finance is accountable, effective, and impactful -it appears to be falling off the agenda.
Gary Forster introduces the aid and development information that can be found on D-Portal – a gateway to the 800,000 projects in the International Aid transparency Initiative dataset. Using the example of investments made by the African Development Bank into water and sanitation projects in Zambia, Gary shows the wealth of information (such as objectives, partners, funding disbursements, and evaluation reports) that can be explored when agencies publish good data.
Zacharey Carmichael, Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Agriculture and Food Global Practice discusses how the Global Food and Nutrition Security Dashboard uses International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data to support real-time emergency decision-making.
Ahead of tomorrow’s launch of the 2024 Aid Transparency Index, George Ingram, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution has been investigating exactly what you can find out with International Aid Transparency Initiative data.
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 those organisations funding and implementing aid projects to publish data, versus just the largest.
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.
