There are many ways you can support the aid and development finance transparency agenda. As a start, please see our Aid Transparency Principles and consider adopting or adapting them within your organisation.

• If you produce data, publish it
  • Disaggregated information on aid and development needs to be regularly published and freely available if it is going to help effective spending, evaluation, and accountability. In order to promote more effective aid, all donors need to provide their information in a comparable open format that meets the needs of recipient governments and civil society.The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) offers a comparable standard for publishing aid and development finance information. It also satisfies our four pillars of transparency, ensuring data is published in a manner that is timely, comprehensive, accessible and comparable. Read more about how to publish to the IATI Registry.
• If you have data, use it
  • Data producers should use the data to see what works, what doesn’t and allocate funds to the countries, sectors and programmes where they can make the biggest difference. Watch Helen Clark discuss how the UNDP do this at the 2016 Aid Transparency Index launch.
  • Journalists and budget watchdogs should use data to tell stories about development, to follow the money and hold governments and donors to account- see examples from Nigeria and Nepal.
  • Civil society organisations should use the data to inform their campaigns, highlight the gaps and monitor the results of aid. Organisations in Afghanistan and Tanzania are already doing this.
  • Partner country governments can integrate the data with their budget systems and use it to help with planning and programme implementation. Both Myanmar and Bangladesh are currently attempting this.
• If you don’t have data, demand it
  • Governments of partner countries should ask for timely, comprehensive and forward-looking data from donors, using open data standards like IATI. President Koroma did this at the EU Ebola conference in 2015.
  • Citizens should demand their governments to publish what they fund, online and in real time. Over 5,000 people from 115 countries signed our Make Aid Transparent campaign in 2012.
  • Activists and advocates should use global forums like the United Nations, the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation and the Open Government Partnership to press for data publication and use.
  • Development workers and local governments should ask emergency responders to share data with them, in real time, to help coordinate humanitarian relief efforts and make sure no-one is left behind.
  • Journalists and budget watchdogs should point out where the lack of data means we don’t know what is going on, so as to encourage better publication in the future.

Get in touch with Publish What You Fund and the IATI Secretariat to find out how to work with us to demand the data.

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