As of today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is granting free and open access to its database, FAOSTAT , which is the world’s largest repository of data on food, agriculture, and hunger.
The Informal Governance Group and Alliance 2015 have just released a working paper, ‘Aid and Budget Transparency in Mozambique: Constraints for Civil Society, the Parliament and the Government’.
Providing a valuable case study and argument for the necessity of aid transparency, the study documents and analyses the problems faced by civil society, the Parliament and the Government of Mozambique when doing work related to the budget with less-than-transparent aid.
The brilliant blogger and economist Owen Barder yesterday clarified the total amount of money spent on aid since it began in the 1960s. According to OECD DAC statistics, together donors have given $502 billion ($866 billion in today’s prices) to sub-Saharan Africa; a far cry from the ‘over a trillion’ quoted by aid sceptics, who may be relieved to find out it is in fact only ‘billions’ worth of aid that ‘hasn’t worked’.
Doug Hadden, Vice President of Products at FreeBalance, asks how corruption might best be understood and tackled in a Sustainable Public Financial Management blog post last week. Hadden starts with the common (if unarticulated) public feeling that recipients are largely responsible for the loss of aid money by corruption.
