ANALYSIS

KOICA scores 27.9%, placing it in the poor category. Ranked 15^th out of 49 bilateral agencies, it is more transparent than most European donors, including traditional donors such as Finland, Spain and Italy. It performs well on organisational-level planning information and the provision of project documents. It performs less strongly on the systematic provision of basic information, classifications and financial data for its activities. Although KOICA has a project database with information on many of its activities, information on current projects was unfortunately not available at the time of data collection, resulting in KOICA’s poor performance at the activity level.  Of the 22 indicators that take format into account, only one – disaggregated budgets – is published in a machine-readable format, in Korea’s Forward Spending Survey report to the OECD DAC.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Korea should join IATI and begin publishing in 2014 to meet its Busan commitments. KOICA should work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Strategy and Finance (Economic Development Cooperation Fund) to produce an ambitious implementation schedule by early 2014 that aims to fully implement the IATI standard by the end of 2015.
• KOICA should ensure that information on all its aid activities on its projects database is up to date.
• Korea should update its OGP National Action Plan to include commitments to aid transparency and implementing IATI.

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