30.
U.S. – President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
Fair
OVERVIEW
PEPFAR is the U.S. government’s programme to combat HIV/AIDS, and is formally part of the Department of State. It has been assessed independently due to the size of its budget (over USD 6 billion in 2013 for its bilateral programmes and contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria). It oversees and directly approves all activities of the United States relating to combating HIV/AIDs in priority countries, as well as ensuring policy coordination amongst the U.S. government implementing agencies and departments. See U.S.-wide commitments and recommendations.
PEPFAR should be congratulated for beginning to publish data on its foreign assistance to the IATI Standard in June 2014. Information on PEPFAR activities is currently included in the Department of State’s publication to IATI, and includes information on implementing mechanisms for existing and prospective programmes. PEPFAR’s planned budget information is also available on a separate Dashboard launched in June 2014. It includes approved initial allocations of designated funds by country, implementing agency, sector and sub-sector. However, it does not include any activity-level obligation, disbursement or transaction data and funding to multilateral organisations. Other dashboards are under development and over the course of the next few months, additional planning budgets, results and expenditure data, as well as other information and analyses will be accessible.
ANALYSIS
PEPFAR scores 40.7%, placing it in the fair category. It is one of the biggest improvers in the 2014 Index, gaining over 20 points since 2013. It ranks 16th out of 50 bilateral organisations, ahead of both USAID and the Department of State. PEPFAR’s IATI publication includes basic activity information and classifications as well as forward-looking activity budgets. Although the number of fields published to IATI is limited, there is good coverage of activities for those fields that are included in its IATI files. PEPFAR is one of the few donors to score on the budget ID, which aims to help align information on development flows with recipient country budget classifications. The Country Operation Plans, which include information on PEPFAR’s activities, contain fewer redactions compared to previous years. However, commitments, objectives and sub-national location are still not consistently available for all projects. PEPFAR performs poorly for the provision of project documents and does not score any points for performance information (results, conditions and impact appraisals). It is the only U.S. agency to not score on contracts and commitments. PEPFAR scores on 26 of the 39 indicators. Of the 22 indicators that take format into account, 15 are published in machine-readable formats.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- PEPFAR should publish to IATI using an organisation identifier that enables users to identify and use information on PEPFAR’s specific activities and compare it with information from other organisations.
- It should improve its publication to IATI so it is comprehensive and includes an organisation file with forward-looking budgets and organisation documents, financial data on individual activities and performance information, including results and conditions.
- PEPFAR should publish information on multilateral funding, obligation, disbursement and spending data on all activities via the PEPFAR Dashboard and the IATI Registry.
DONOR PROFILE
First published to IATI:
Jun-14
2013 ATI Score:
16.09%
2013 ATI Rank:
50