Three things you should know about IATI

The first annual conference for the International Aid Transparency Initiative concluded October 21. Several staff members from Development Gateway attended. From their feedback and the conference presentations, a few themes emerged regarding efforts to make aid data more transparent and accessible. Here are three things you should know:

1. The intent of IATI is not to create a database. The aim is to establish a common set of standards and definitions, and a code of conduct for donors.
2. Aid information management systems at the country level do not replace the Creditor Reporting System of the OECD, rather they are complementary. Read the study that compares data reported to the CRS and aid management systems in Malawi and Burkina Faso. Rudolphe Petras of Development Gateway conducted the study, analyzing information in two implementations of the Aid Management Platform.
3. While the primary emphasis is on donors, civil society organizations also share the responsibility for transparency.

So far 18 signatories are committed to the process. The goal of establishing common information standards by the end of this year will probably not be met. Still, there is much interest as the need for increased transparency is great.

The report from the conference is here and the program with links to presentations is here.

A bi-partisan change to USAID

by Matt Gyory

On July 28, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators, including Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Richard Lugar of Indiana, introduced a bill to improve U.S. development efforts by updating the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for the 21st century. The introduction of this bill was part of a larger effort to improve USAID and increase its role in U.S. development efforts.

Senator Lugar has been particularly vocal in his support of changing the way USAID conducts business. He has written an op-ed in which he outlines many of the features to be found in the bi-partisan bill, including the need for increased staff and tracking project outputs to determine successes and best practices. Recently, Senator Lugar wrote a letter to the editors of the Washington Post to highlight the difficulty the Obama administration has had in finding a USAID Administrator.

In addition to the bi-partisan support and momentum this bill represents, it is a new commitment of USAID to the goals of transparent data and the measurement of its activities. Both Sections five (page nine of the bill in particular) and section six of the bill highlight the need for USAID to collect data and perform monitoring and evaluation assessments on their programs. These sections of the bill will improve the effectiveness of USAID’s efforts and possibly provide the development community as a whole with best practices and certainly with a surfeit of data on USAID’s activities.

To ensure that the information USAID will now collect will be used, Section 10 of the bill recommends that the U.S. fully engage and comply with the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI was one of the outcomes of last year’s high level forum in Accra. The type of transparent information IATI compliance would entail will give U.S. and international aid practitioners a greater wealth of information to ensure more effective aid.

The two parts of the bill highlighted here are clearly related. There is little point in collecting all of information USAID will be required to collect if no one will ever see it. The two major points are also key issues for Development Gateway. Aid effectiveness has been a key point of our work and we have begun to emphasize the possibilities that more transparent information can offer. We look forward to the progression of this bill and hope that whatever final version is submitted to President Obama for his signature contains these provisions to ensure more transparent, effective aid.

The full text of the legislation is available here.

Making sense of aid flows

by Emily Kallaur

Through AiDA (the Accessible Information on Development Activities) database we are trying to provide an increasingly comprehensive picture of development assistance flows around the world. I just came across a picture that illustrates how challenging this problem can be—it’s from a 2007 paper entitled “Trends and Issues in Development Aid,” by Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution.


It’s quite a complex web! In recent months we have added data feeds from more private aid organizations to AiDA, and we are working to capture more. The more information can be reflected in a single repository, using a single format, the better development actors will be able to assess where funds are going and how they are being used.

The paper and diagram above also highlight the relatively small share of development aid that makes it to countries as “programmable aid.” The definition of programmable aid excludes debt relief, humanitarian and food aid, technical assistance, and donors’ administrative costs—not because these are not worthwhile, but in order to zero in on the aid flows that can be used by recipient governments to invest in development. Kharas found that only about $38 billion of the over $100 billion in official development assistance from OECD/DAC member states was channeled to developing countries as “net programmable aid” (as of 2007). For Sub-Saharan Africa, net programmable aid of about $12 billion in 2005 was approximately the same amount (once adjusted for purchasing power) that was delivered in 1985.

This situation underscores the need for detailed, standardized data on aid flows in order to understand what is really happening on the ground, and gauge its impact. Another implication is that recipient governments need aid information that can be easily disaggregated into programmable aid, that they can reflect in the national budget and direct toward development priorities, and other types of aid (such as technical assistance) which do not represent financial flows to the country. Currently this level of detail is not necessarily the case.

CSO development effectiveness

by Anna Lauridsen

Since its beginning, the international aid effectiveness agenda has primarily focused on the policies of national governments and bi- and multilateral organisations. Fortunately, this policy debate is increasingly trickling down to civil society organisations (CSOs).

In early July, civil society organisations were invited to take part in the consultations of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) in Brussels. Launched in September 2008 at the Accra High Level Forum, the IATI brings together donor countries, developing country governments, non-governmental organisations, and experts in aid information to agree on ways of sharing more and better information about aid.

The IATI CSO consultations in Brussels had the purpose of better understanding the kinds of information about donor aid flows that European CSOs require and to identify recommendations in developing the IATI standards. Similar consultations will be held with CSOs from the developing world.

In June 2009 some 170 representatives from CSOs, donors and governments from nearly 50 countries from around the world gathered in Prague for the conference “Civil Society Organizations Development Effectiveness”. The conference was organised by the Czech NGDO platform “FoRS” in collaboration with CONCORD.

Participants were invited to tackle questions such as: What are the key principles of development effectiveness? What is the specific role of CSOs in development that could best contribute to their full potential? How is effectiveness influenced by external conditions and how to turn these conditions into advantages? The Prague conference concluded with a statement which sets out principles of CSO development effectiveness. Participants committed to deepen discussions of these principles within the Open Forum for CSO effectiveness.

These two CSO gatherings point to two things. Firstly, the gathering momentum of the aid effectiveness agenda (and how to put it into practice) and, secondly, the need for a broad-based, inclusive effort. In other words, the involvement of development experts from various organisations and structures, be it national governments and civil society pulling in the same direction. With these kinds of initiatives, the aid effectiveness agenda stands a chance of succeeding.

To shine a light on aid, standardize the info

by Emily Kallaur

There’s a lot of buzz about open source software these days. This week The Economist declared that open source has “won the argument” and is now well respected as an alternative to proprietary software. Openness, it seems, is victorious.

However, the article points out a new threat to openness—that a lack of common data standards will make it difficult for organizations to migrate their data from one system to another. This brings to mind the discussions around the International Aid Transparency Initiative and the need for a common standard for aid information.

There’s a lot of data out there on aid-funded projects and programs. It resides in many types of systems—global databases like AiDA, country systems like the Aid Management Platform, and plenty of other specialized sites. Without a common language for these systems to talk to each other, it’s not possible to aggregate, disaggregate, and compare the information. And that makes it harder to answer the critical question: in development, which approaches work and which don’t?

Enough of aid ineffectiveness

by Anna Lauridsen

In a recent communication, the EC predicts that the cost of not fully implementing the Accra Agenda for Action adopted in 2008 may amount to as much as € 5 to € 7 billion euro a year until 2015. Such a figure is not only mindboggling, but also utterly indefensible. In the current climate of economic and financial downturn, resources are scarce in both the so called developed, as in the developing, world. Subsequently such a loss of the total EU aid budget due to “aid ineffectiveness” is unlikely to go down well with either the European taxpayers or the aid recipient countries.

Despite the billions of euro that are potentially lost, the Triple Fs, in other words, the three crises: food, fuel and finance, have resulted in calls for increased levels of development aid from the donors. As most governments were already failing to fulfill the target of committing 0,7% of their countries' GDP to Official Development Assistance, even before these financially sour times washed over the globe as a giant tsunami, it is unlikely that aid levels will increase.

One may even be so bold as to ask whether more money is really the answer or if it would merely be a way of throwing money at the problem. If the financial crisis has taught us anything it must be that good management is key, and something which has been lacking for a long while. Why not take advantage of the current situation to look over the regulations and management tools ruling the aid industry (for it is an industry of proportions) just as we are imposing similar demands on the banking and financial systems? Progress has been made; big summits have been held and declarations signed (for instance, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the AAA, and the IATI. Now is the time to take it one step further and put them into practice. That way, we could avoid wasting taxpayer’s money and make sure it reaches those it was intended for.