Many international aid organizations are “dragging their feet” in meeting commitments to make their finances more transparent, according to a report released Oct. 8.
The Aid Transparency Index 2014 report evaluates how well countries and other international aid donors are doing in fulfilling transparency commitments made at the 2011 Busan development summit.
“This is a key time to see how donors are doing with implementing their Busan commitments on aid transparency,” said Publish What You Fund (PWYF) Director Rachel Rank.
The group issued the following three conclusions:
- In spite of a “race to the top” atmosphere among donors, a long tail of groups lags behind their commitments. PWYF analyzed 68 participating organizations, but found only fifteen to be on track to meet their end-of-2015 commitments.
- A lack of comparability, depth, and timeliness in the presentation of donation data dampens accessibility and ease of use. The 37 donors earning a grade of “Poor” or “Very Poor” often posted data that was out of date or used overly technical and inaccessible formats.
- It is possible for any country or type of organization to improve its ranking, the report said. The African Development Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the United Nations Children’s Fund all improved their rankings substantially, and in a relatively short period of time.
The groups also issued three recommendations:
- In order to avoid undermining the efforts of the higher-performing donors, the global aid community needs to work with under-performing countries and organizations to improve their performance. Coordination of best-practice strategies is critical.
- Development information should be “published in a timely, comparable, comprehensive and accessible manner;” organizations with quality information should promote its use by other governments and civil society.
- All organizations need to meet the December 2015 deadline — “organizations that are lagging behind on delivering their commitments should take urgent action.”
The index uses a scoring system that measures the accessibility and comparability of aid data and assigns a percentile score.
Fifteen organizations attained a “Very Good” or “Good” ranking. The top ranking organization is the United Nations Development Programme, with a score of 90.6%.
Although the US Millennium Challenge Corporation ranked third, “Poor” rankings were given to the U.S. departments of state, treasury and defense.
China placed last (2.2%) for the second year running.
PWYF aims to “improve the effectiveness of aid so that its benefits are felt by those who need it and citizens… are able to hold their governments to account.”
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