ANALYSIS

New Zealand scores 47.8%, placing it in the fair category, just behind the European Commission departments and the Netherlands. It ranks 7^th out of 49 bilateral organisations. Although New Zealand is an IATI publisher, there is a room for improvement in the quality of its IATI data, in particular its coverage of recipient countries. New Zealand performs well on basic and classification information at the activity level and the provision of project documents for which it scores above the fair category average. It performs less well on organisation-level financial information and performance data, particularly the latter for which it does not score any points. Of the 22 indicators that take format into account, just over two thirds are published in machine-readable formats. Activity documents appear to be consistently available on MFAT’s website, suggesting that they could also be published through its IATI feed.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• New Zealand should improve its publication to IATI so it is comprehensive and uses all fields, includes organisation-level information and information on aid activities in all its recipient countries. It should also update its implementation schedule by early 2014 so it is more ambitious, aiming for full implementation of IATI by the end of 2015.
• It should promote access and use of New Zealand aid information via the government’s open data portal.
• New Zealand should honour its commitment to join OGP in late 2013. This would be an opportunity to share best practice in open data and open government approaches with peers in the development community and with partners who receive aid from New Zealand.

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