aidinfo.org » transparency

Oxfam publishes its second batch of transparent data

aidinfo — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:38:26 +0000

This week we have a guest blog from Paul Clough, head of International Finance at Oxfam GB. Oxfam have just published their second wave of data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Paul explains the details of this data and why transparency is important to Oxfam GB. Back in November of 2011 ahead of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Oxfam GB became one of the first INGOs to publish its programme data to IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative. The IATI standard was agreed in February 2011 when donors, developing country governments, civil society and aid information experts agreed on a common, open, international standard for publishing more, and better, information about aid. IATI's aim is that those involved in aid programmes will be able to better track what aid is being used for and what it is achieving. Improved transparency should help partner governments to manage aid resources more effectively and help to monitor effectiveness and even reduce the scope for corruption. Today Oxfam is releasing its second batch of IATI-compliant data, which for the first time includes information about our campaigns and advocacy projects, as well as international programmes. The new data covers financial years 2010/11 and 2011/12 and lists 1,343 projects in 56 countries. Some projects have been omitted from publication to avoid any risk to staff security or harm to our operations. The criteria for the exclusions from publication are outlined in our Open Information Policy. In 2011 we made a commitment to publish more information more regularly; this second batch includes campaigns project data. We are also working on improving the quality of the data we publish and reducing the level of exclusions. Why publish more data? The motivation behind publishing our data in this way is to improve understanding of our work and our accountability. We are committed to being accountable to our key stakeholders, in particular people living in poverty and believe that ultimately greater transparency will improve the quality of aid, for the good of both donors and beneficiaries. In addition to the data we’re sharing today, we also publish relevant project documents. In 2010 we made a selection of programme and campaign evaluation reports public for the first time. There are now 102 reports available to download from our website. This number is set to grow as we strive to implement our Evaluations Policy and be increasingly transparent about the impact of our programmes. Making sense of the numbers There is growing awareness, including within the UK Government, that just dumping 'raw' data isn't enough for transparency, and the open nature of the IATI data format means that third parties can mine the data to draw meaningful conclusions from it. Since Oxfam published their first batch of data, a number of tools and applications have been developed using IATI data, including the AidView data visualisation platform developed by AidInfo. This tool enables users to filter IATI data from 15 funders by sector, country and funder. It's an open source prototype and the authors are open to feedback about how the tool should be developed. The platform is worth exploring for anyone involved in aid information, whether at a research, policy or practitioner level. Or even if you're just an unashamed data fan! Read more about Oxfam's work on IATI and Open Information View the Oxfam programme data in the IATI registry

Settling the dust on the World Bank Presidential selection… for now.

aidinfo — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:50:11 +0000

This week we have a guest blog from the author David Shaman. David wrote “The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency“, an insider’s account of how the world’s largest international financial institution makes decisions. David was Communications Manager of the Bank’s Development Economics Research Group on the Environment from 1993 to 2000, where he co-authored “Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments”, a major Bank policy report on industrial pollution in the developing world. He also developed and managed the New Ideas in Pollution Regulation (NIPR) website, which was ranked as the Bank’s best website in 2000. He has also served as a legislative aide to two members of Congress and as a press secretary to a member of the New York City Council. Take a look at some more of David's guest blogs. On July 1^st, 2012, Jim Yong Kim will become the 12^th president in the history of the World Bank. For this health policy professional without a traditional background on finance, economics or managing large bureaucracies, it is an impressive personal achievement. Nevertheless, accompanying Kim’s appointment may be a sense of cynicism among institutional observers regarding the selection as a fait accompli and yet another example of the United States using its weighty leverage upon the rest of the Bank’s membership to install “their man.” All this may be true, but I would also argue new and important shifts occurred during this selection process that signal changes in how future selections will be conducted. Consider the obvious. All eleven of Kim’s predecessors were white males with backgrounds in finance or were politically connected to sitting U.S. administrations. Kim, a global health specialist, is Korean-American. Kim’s selection as the U.S. nominee signals a recognition by the Obama Administration that it was no longer business as usual. Its nominee’s background had to reflect broader criteria than previous choices. Given the political realities faced by Obama that losing control over the selection would have given Republicans ammunition for the November election and that the next Bank president had to please a large swath of the institution’s membership and numerous external stakeholders, Kim was a canny choice. However, it would be difficult to argue the United States’ appointment was made unilaterally. For the first time, other countries nominated candidates – Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Minister of Finance and a former managing director at the Bank, and Jose Antonio Ocampo, a former UN undersecretary and development official with an extensive resume - and this provided the Bank’s Board with qualified and viable alternatives. This was a horse race, albeit one with a heavy favorite. Other important changes indicated Obama’s choice was not made in a vacuum. Soon after current president Robert Zoellick announced he would not seek another term, the Administration floated Lawrence Summers name as a trial balloon. Summers has impressive credentials but he is also highly controversial and a lightning rod for both conservatives and liberals. The crescendo of opposition was deafening. In a previous era, opposition would have been irrelevant (i.e, the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz), but not this time. Obama’s withdrawal of Summers as a candidate signaled that for this nomination at least, the court of public opinion counted. Other candidates were mentioned, notably Hillary Clinton, but it was Summers as they say that ‘set the Twitter world afire.’ Something else unusual unfolded. Jeff Sachs of the Earth Institute set orthodoxy on its head by launching his own candidacy and by any measure appeared quite successful. Though not nominated by any country, Sachs nominated himself and gained public support from a number of developing countries and numerous global development practitioners. Sachs withdrew when Kim was announced. However, what are we to make of this? In the world where new social media tools enhance the power of one to rise above many, we should not be surprised to see other individuals empowered by conviction or perception to move to shape events once defined only by governments or monolithic entities. With this as prologue, let us turn briefly to what occupied our attention when rumors began that Zoellick would retire from the Bank: Namely that the selection process for the next president be open and merit-based. Prior to Kim’s nomination, criticism leveled at the Bank was that the process for selecting its president was neither open and transparent or merit-based. In 2009, the G-20 issued a statement that the leadership of international financial institutions be selected in an open, transparent, merit-based process. In 2010, the Joint Ministerial Committee of the Board of Governors of the World Bank reiterated its support for such a process. So, did the process selecting Kim meet this standard? According to the Bretton Woods Project, a UK-based NGO that monitors the Bank and IMF, in 2011 the Board approved a process that “is closed to any kind of external input and leaves many details to be decided by the board during each selection round.” In essence, the Board itself declared its process for selecting presidents would remain unpublicized. This alludes to another conflict of interest which is particular to the Bank: It is the president of the Bank who chairs the Board. In an open letter to the World Bank’s governors in February 2012, a coalition of international civil society organizations outlined three conditions that would ensure an “open, merit-based, transparent process.” First, since the Bank only operates in developing countries, a nominee must receive support from the majority of middle-income and low-income countries as well as the majority of voting shares of member countries. This double-majority would ensure that the nominee would be seen as a legitimate choice among the membership as opposed to an appointment from a pivotal member country. Second, the process should be open to anyone, interviews should be held in public and with open voting procedures. And, finally, a clear position description and required qualifications should be spelled out and candidates should meet those requirements. The final criteria set out by the coalition may be open to interpretation depending upon one’s view of the candidates. However, the first two criteria provide little room for interpretation and if one analyzed the process that selected Kim objectively it would lead one to logically conclude it failed to meet the first two criteria as defined by the coalition. The current process of candidate securing the nomination remains akin to how cardinals inside the Vatican select Popes – vague and opaque like white smoke. Following Kim’s selection, both Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman to contest for the position, and Ocampo suggested internal politics rather than merit was the deciding criteria. Translation: The U.S. and Europe, majority stakeholders of the Bank, and IMF, continued to enforce the informal quid pro quo of appointing the heads of those institutions. Moreover, when candidates presented their credentials to the Board, it was not open to the public. In fact, the Obama Administration’s strategy for securing Kim’s nomination was to keep his views away from the public. Kim launched a global “listening tour.” Translation: Kim would make no public statements and conduct his candidacy essentially behind closed doors. How can we know what a candidate’s vision for the institution and its role to promote sustainable development and poverty reduction in the world’s poorest regions is if those views were not made public prior to the selection? Two candidates understood this: Okonjo-Iweala and Ocampo presented themselves and took questions in open forums hosted by the Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington-based think tank on international development, prior to the Board’s vote. Okonjo-Iweala even suggested a televised debate of all three candidates. In the aftermath of the Bank’s process, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development also selected a new president. Owen Barder, a senior fellow at CGD, interviewed four of the five candidates seeking the presidency of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. As Barder noted,

It is much harder for shareholders to appoint a manifestly unsuitable candidate if they have all been subjected to public scrutiny.

Keeping the doors closed is also an issue for the Bank’s Board. The public does not know how their governments voted. This suggests the process itself remains far removed from the standard defined by the coalition. The work conducted by CGD is an excellent initiative, but it is not a substitute for having the Board’s process open to the public. If we harken back just a few years, the view of the Bank as a monolithic empire making critical economic decisions behind closed doors was central to its image for millions of observers. To mitigate this image, the Bank has worked actively in the past few years to open its documents and datasets and promote itself as a more transparent organization. This is good progress but further steps are necessary. One step would be to open up the Board’s deliberations on selecting Bank presidents for public viewing. Whenever a U.S. president makes a nomination for a Cabinet position, the nominee goes before the U.S. Senate for confirmation. The confirmation process is open to anyone who wishes to attend and is broadcast live to millions via C-SPAN. There is good reason to do this, because to keep confirmations behind closed doors would diminish the legitimacy of these nominations and reduce the effectiveness of a sitting administration. Any nominee to the post of World Bank president or International Monetary Fund managing director will likely have an enormous impact on the global economy. Should not those nominees be as publicly scrutinized as any Cabinet selection? Those who have read my previous writings will note that I have long advocated for the Bank to resurrect its defunct webcasting activities as a means for openly and transparently sharing development knowledge to its shareholders and stakeholders. Here, again, is another opportunity and an immensely important reason for the Bank to re-engage webcasting as a means of sharing critical information with global stakeholders. To enhance the legitimacy of the candidates, the ultimate selection, the nomination process and the institution itself, I would encourage webcasts of Board deliberations of future Bank presidents be available to the public via webcasts. Finally, some have argued that selections be made via secret ballots so as to eliminate countries enforcing backroom deals about supporting one candidate over another. The rationale is legitimate, but a weakness in the position is accountability for a selection will be absent if a nominee performs poorly. From my perspective, it would be better to follow the example set by the U.S. Senate by mandating votes cast by Board members be made public as well.

The Vital Contribution of Transparency to Development Effectiveness: Video

aidinfo — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:44:34 +0000

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the (transparency) movement...will produce the most important transformation in the 50 years of modern development experience. Transparency will lead us to new achievements in poverty reduction.

Brian Atwood, Chair of the OECD DAC

Brian Atwood, Chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), has pledged the full support of his organisation to the principles agreed at Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in November, 2011. In a speech, which you can view above, given at Church House Conference Centre in Westminster, he emphasised the crucial role that transparency has in increasing the effectiveness of aid and development. Mr Atwood confirmed the support and cooperation of the OECD DAC to join the movement:

We within the DAC very strongly support IATI (the International Aid Transparency Initiative). We’re committed to do what the Busan Agreement has called upon us to do, which is to implement a common, open standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on resources provided through development cooperation.

At Development Initiatives we feel this commitment is crucial. As the emerging global partnership takes its place alongside the DAC, it's important that it has a clear role and is not perceived as a talking shop. Building on the critical mass that has now developed around IATI, it is our desire that the emerging global partnership has responsibility for the governance and delivery of the initiative. This would help to ensure that developing countries see IATI as something in which they have a shared interest and of which they have shared ownership - and it will clearly distinguish IATI from the valuable role that the DAC continues to pursue on reporting donor performance. Mr Atwood also outlined the DAC’s belief in the power of transparency to improve the nuts and bolts of the development process, highlighting its role in reducing waste as well as providing the information which is essential for planning and budgeting. The role of partner countries A key issue, stated Mr Atwood, focuses on the involvement of, and benefits for, developing countries in the outcomes of the transparency movement:

If there is one message that should come through clearly from Busan it is the effort to try to empower partner countries . . . and that is the primary thrust of Busan.

One of the basic needs that the transparency movement has reacted to is the need for accountability, to taxpayers in the west but also, and more importantly, to those who are supposed to benefit from aid. Mr Atwood refers strongly to these priorities and draws on the needs for developing country governments to have access to the information they need to be able to properly plan and execute their own budgets:

We can only demand accountability, and we can only foster accountability, if we give our partners the basic means to manage their development resources so as to achieve the best results.

Forward-looking data A main focus of the transparency movement and one of the key benefits of IATI concerns the issue of forward-looking data and future-funding plans. Mr Atwood said:

They (partner countries) need to have information about the future . . . we also need information on publishing what you plan to fund over the next three to five years.

Progress is being made towards these goals, with IATI placing focus on signatories publishing forward-looking data. Three-quarters of the DAC membership have now agreed to publish this information, but we need full support from all DAC members, so there is still work to be done. There is real evidence that IATI is already improving the effectiveness of aid. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, the government has been able to access donor’s forward-spending plans published through IATI and integrate them into their aid management system. This will allow them to plan their budget in a more informed way, resulting in more effective aid outcomes and poverty reduction spending. Mr Atwood summed up by highlighting the DAC’s commitments to implementing those terms agreed at Busan:

The DAC is in a new era. We are as much behind transparency as we possibly could be . . . there is no negative reaction to our embracing the Busan commitment to integrate these important initiatives, the CRS and IATI, and to create a common standard and begin implementing it, with full force . . . It will change the behaviour of donors, it will change the behaviour of partner countries, and it will make it easier for us to implement all of the other provisions of Busan.

At Development Initiatives, we were very pleased to be able to invite Mr Atwood to speak on these themes in London, described by him as the ‘epicentre of transparency’. Mr Atwood acknowledged the key role that UK-AID and the Department for International Development (DFID) had in creating and promoting the IATI standard. Our view is that transparency is now a key and inescapable part of the contract between citizen and state. It underpins efficiency and accountability in the use of resources and ultimately impacts on poverty and development. Judith Randel, Director of Development Initiatives, says:

Access to information and transparency has to be a core part of the 2015 settlement, as important as access to water and sanitation and education in terms of delivering poverty eradication.

View the full version of the speech followed by the question and answer session in the video above.

The transparency of process

aidinfo — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:06:38 +0000

It’s time for the third and final segment in our three-part guest blog series from the author David Shaman. You can read the first two parts of this series here and here. David is the author of “The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency“, an insider’s account of how the world’s largest international financial institution makes decisions. David was the communications manager of the Bank’s Development Economics Research Group on the Environment from 1993 to 2000, where he co-authored “Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments”, a major Bank policy report on industrial pollution in the developing world. He also developed and managed the New Ideas in Pollution Regulation (NIPR) website, which was ranked as the Bank’s best website in 2000. He has also served as a legislative aide to two members of Congress and as a press secretary to a member of the New York City Council. It is remarkable to think how much more we know about international development agencies today than we did just two decades ago. In part, this is an acknowledgement of the active effort of the agencies themselves to make information available to the public. Information disclosure policies, public information centers, websites and online directories, email communications and newsletters, and social media tools now provide us with so much content it is often difficult to digest. And, with this profusion of information, government officials are better able to administer projects affecting their citizenry and academics, activists and communities are better positioned to understand the impact of those projects. External stakeholders have fought for this and have been rewarded with access to millions of documents. They know more now than ever before. Nevertheless, the question remains: Do they know the right and the best information in which to make informed decisions about development issues in their country? More specifically, stakeholders know more about what development agencies produce and what they decide. What is less clear is whether stakeholders know enough about how development agencies approach their work, why they act the way they do and how they make their decisions. To a significant extent, the “what” is there, but the “how” and the “why” are missing. This is because much of the focus by the development community has been on the products of development rather than the process of development. The process – the discussions, debates, arguments, meetings, research, back-and-forth – that formulates policies, positions institutions and moves projects largely remains out of view and behind closed doors. We get the final products. We know less about how they came to be. What if a system existed that would allow the public to view the policy dialogues taking place within our public institutions so we could better understand what they were doing and why the decisions they made were taking place? In fact, there are two extraordinary initiatives that have changed how we view public institutions. The first, C-SPAN, began in 1979. C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) is a cable television network that provides coverage of the U.S. federal government. C-SPAN’s “gavel-to-gavel” format of the U.S. Congress means that viewers watch live and unedited coverage of its floor discussions and debates and many committee hearings. This transparent coverage has expanded over the years to hearing and briefings of other federal agencies, most notably the regular White House press briefings. Initially, C-SPAN covered only the U.S. House of Representatives, because the U.S. Senate refused to allow access. However, after years of watching favorable opinion polls for the House climb at their expense, the Senate finally followed suit in 1986. By establishing a completely neutral environment where cameras film events without comment, biases are eliminated from coverage. This is critical for viewer opinions are shaped only by what the participants say or do. As a result, C-SPAN has separated itself from the partisan political talk shows that populate airwaves and is seen by the public as a truly objective lens on American democracy. A 2010 poll estimated that 79 million Americans watched C-SPAN during the previous year. More Congressional decisions are made under public scrutiny and a strong argument can be made that it is to the benefit both of Congress and the public. Substantial polling reveals the electorate is better informed about issues than in previous generations and political leaders are better at internalizing public sentiment into their voting records. Public interest and policy groups are also able to gather information that allows them to more effectively rally their constituencies and lobby politicians for their cause. The political establishment benefits as well. Political players can now comprehensively spread messages to their constituencies, mobilize key advocates and allies and monitor positions taken by counterparts. Two decades after C-SPAN, a second experiment began unfolding within the confines of the World Bank. B-SPAN, launched by Bank economist David Wheeler and by this writer in 2000, had three objectives: To give Bank staff a mechanism for communicating with their stakeholders and expanding their influence; to give government officials, economists, academics, development practitioners, the public and Bank staff access to information being created and shared within the Bank so they might use it to further their own economic development and poverty reduction activities; and, to bridge the divide between the Bank and its external critics who viewed the institution with skepticism and concern. The system began during a period when civil society organizations and activists were holding massive demonstrations because they considered Bank and IMF policies detrimental to the world’s poor. The webcasting station’s principle of complete transparency – meaning no editing of webcasting streams – allowed the system to operate as conduit of information to the public free of spin. During its initial five years of operation it produced more than 700 webcasts and by 2004 had a quarter million viewers and captured nearly 2% of the Bank’s Internet traffic. However, in 2005, the institution, still evolving over issues of internal transparency, reduced B-SPAN’s funding and the system went into a sharp and immediate decline. Though both were successful in terms of public interest, a key difference between C-SPAN and B-SPAN led one to survive and the other to disappear. American politicians saw the advantage of using C-SPAN as a tool for getting messages to constituents to solidify their popularity. Though supported by the wide majority of Bank staffers, key bureaucratic insiders who controlled B-SPAN’s funding were less comfortable with its transparency. The constituency of these unelected officials was not millions of people living in poverty, but rather direct superiors and the notion of harboring a medium that provided no filters on the gavel-to-gavel coverage of Bank dialogues was highly unsettling. Since 2005, B-SPAN has remained largely muted. In 2011, however, its saga took a new twist. The New York Times published a lengthy expose on the Bank’s progress on transparency, but noted that B-SPAN remained closed. The Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, subsequently called upon the Bank to reinvest funds into B-SPAN to close this gap in its evolving transparency agenda. Then, during the fall annual meetings, a coalition of more than 100 civil society organizations and activists wrote President Zoellick urging him once again to fund B-SPAN. In response, Bank officials have suggested that a new platform that aggregates technologies, including webcasting, to foster greater two-way dialogue between the Bank and its stakeholders might be created. While promising if completed, it seeks a far different objective than what B-SPAN sought to achieve. During the past year, a dialogue has emerged between the Bank and external actors, including this writer, on the merits of B-SPAN. Some in the Bank have suggested the webcasting system was a dinosaur of another epoch, an invention whose time had come and gone. The evidence, B-SPAN’s previous popularity, C-SPAN’s current popularity and the explosive growth of online video content, however, does not support this position. Some officials have suggested viewers are not interested in watching two-hour Bank seminars. This notion unfortunately places the Bank in a logic trap. Managing Director Caroline Anstey recently noted “Increasingly, it’s our knowledge … that countries and policymakers want to tap.” The Bank repeatedly states it has state-of-the-art knowledge and its future security resides in expanding beyond its traditional role as a financial instrument toward one as a knowledge resource. If the Bank thinks B-SPAN doesn’t have a market, wouldn’t that also suggest the Bank has doubts about the quality of its knowledge? Moreover, if the Bank believes there would be no demand for webcasts of its knowledge, then why hold seminars and conferences at all? Finally, some officials have suggested audiences would not be interested in watching long seminars. That is erroneous. Again, B-SPAN attracted a quarter million viewers in 2004 using old technology. A Bank webcasting system would not and should not be designed to appeal to the same audience as a CNN, which caters to news junkies flipping through three-minute streams of breaking news events. B-SPAN was focused on government officials, economists, academics, and development practitioners who wanted or needed to become immersed in the nitty-gritty of a particular subject. And, careful analysis of webcast traffic can allow the Bank to focus resources primarily on events of most interest to its stakeholders. Some have wondered about costs. Even in a time of shrinking budgets, the cost of running the system is minimal – about $250,000 when I managed B-SPAN. In fact, a pricing mechanism could be implemented that would make a webcasting system generate revenue. More importantly, with advances in streaming technologies and new social media tools and mobile phone applications, B-SPAN streams could now reach the Bank's 185-country membership instantaneously and at little cost. Envision then the following scenario: The Bank hosts a hypothetical event where a Bank health expert along with counterparts from PAHO and WHO convene a session at headquarters to discuss “Preventing the Next Cholera Outbreak in Haiti: New Ideas and New Information Technologies.” The event concludes at 2pm and is webcast live or instantly archived on Bank servers. Shortly afterwards, the Bank and event participants are Tweeting their followers about the event and its availability. Corresponding photo content and links go online via Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn. Later that afternoon, NGOs, health and aid workers in Port-au-Prince receive Tweets and immediately begin watching the event on their mobile phones and iPads – and they, in turn, contact their networks through Retweets, texts or emails. Multiply this example exponentially if all the regional development banks did this as well. If the Bank wants to retain or increase its clout as the focal point on development knowledge, this would be one fruitful and cost-effective way to do it. Bank clients would increasingly focus on the institution as a one-stop shop for administering their development needs. Just one project generated from a webcast could finance the system for years. Changing bureaucratic cultures – not just the Bank’s - tend to occur at glacial speed. Communication technologies such as the Internet, email and social media are, like global warming, changing institutional cultures more quickly today and the Bank’s evolution on transparency is an example. But the development community needs more than the products international development agencies produce. The community needs to be more involved in the process through which development agencies make their strategic business decisions. This means access to their dialogues and debates. Webcasting will allow this to happen, but it is up to the development community, as it did with information and document access, to compel the Bank and other international development agencies to act.

The Meaning of Transparency – A Perspective

aidinfo — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:48:59 +0000

This week sees the first in a three-part guest blog series from David Shaman, we will run part two of this series at the same time next week. David is the author of “The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency“, an insider’s account of how the world’s largest international financial institution makes decisions. David was the communications manager of the Bank’s Development Economics Research Group on the Environment from 1993 to 2000, where he co-authored “Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments”, a major Bank policy report on industrial pollution in the developing world. He also developed and managed the New Ideas in Pollution Regulation (NIPR) website, which was ranked as the Bank’s best website in 2000. He has also served as a legislative aide to two members of Congress and as a press secretary to a member of the New York City Council. Transparency has been one of the hot buzzwords in the international development field over the last decade, and one so hot that it dominates or influences many discussions and initiatives taking place in the industry. For advocates of greater openness, it has been fruitful to watch and to borrow a phrase from the American civil rights movement it has been ‘a long time coming.’ Given man’s natural proclivity to look over his shoulder, it is possible to identify underlying drivers of why “transparency” is in vogue. For example, in 1966, Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act. C-SPAN began gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. In 1986, in response to the Bhopal, India tragedy, the U.S. Congress passed The Community Right-to-Know Act that created a Toxic Release Inventory, a public record of pollutants released by manufacturers. In the mid-1990s, the rise of the Internet and email communications allowed isolated groups and individuals to interact with alacrity on issues of mutual interest. Over the past five years, the emergence of social media tools expanded and accelerated this reach. And, perhaps of most relevance to international development organizations, in the aftermath of the Cold War, civil society focused more closely on the international financial architecture regarding its role in reducing poverty in developing countries, improving the environment and fostering the global economy. (This list is by no means comprehensive, so please feel free to offer other events and opinions below.) Transparency, however, has not historically been a natural inclination for development institutions. Development agencies have been instinctively wary of greater openness of information about institutional activities and actions. Internal actors have reasons and those reasons when put into perspective are not unreasonable. Public disclosure reveals mistakes as well as successes, but mistakes are much more interesting to scrutinize: Remember it is bad news that sells newspapers. And just as in any other type of bureaucratic institution, many employees are focused on long-term careers and personal security. Exposure of missteps is an anathema. From their perspective, transparency has other important shortcomings. Bureaucratic players accrue power and responsibility over time and by increments. Greater transparency allows additional actors to participate, thereby reducing the power and ability internal actors have to regulate policy and events. Nor do they find comfort in how external participation may dilute and delay the decision making process. Over the years however, pockets of transparency advocates have grown within development agencies, working on the inside and at the forefront of the transparency debate to encourage their respective organizations to join the movement. Their involvement has been important in terms of influencing aid providers to adopt transparency measures and policy. The counterfactual, in my view, is far more important for it focuses less on the gain or loss for the institution or the individual and focuses more on the gain or loss regarding the end objective. When public institutions are free to make decisions behind a veil, then it will be less likely those decisions will be made with full information. It will be less likely these institutions secure support for their objectives, because it will be harder for stakeholders to understand how and why those decisions were made. Moreover, in the case of international development agencies, it will make the likelihood that policy or project implementation will be less successful if targeted audiences are simply recipients of aid as opposed to participants in the decision-making process: In other words, to increase their influence, international development institutions would better serve their constituencies and themselves if they are orchestrating rather than dictating. Finally, it will be more difficult to determine accountability for decisions involving public funds that negatively impact stakeholders thereby reducing their trust of those institutions. It has been suggested that greater transparency will result in development institutions becoming more risk-adverse. This argument has validity. By further opening the decision making process to public scrutiny, development agencies will take fewer chances in an industry where some risk taking is necessary. Instead, these organizations will engage in safe or sure bets, institutionalizing incremental gains over protracted time frames in an environment where people living in abject poverty need help now. However, one may also argue that greater openness would reduce the amount of decisions that lead to bad results. These advocates would also suggest that over time, as greater transparency assimilates within a culture, it will evolve to be seen as an appropriate process for making decisions and allow greater risk taking over time. In my 2010 book, The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency, I offered a personal interpretation on the meaning of transparency. “Transparency means openness and accountability, but it also suggests something else: Inclusion. Without it, the rest of what transparency’s proponents seek to achieve is hollow.” Please note, this did not suggest that I believed transparency was the end goal, but rather a means to an end. I think of transparency as a three-sided paradigm: Openness, accountability and inclusion/participation. When one side of the equation is missing, then the others are weakened and the paradigm becomes powerless. Also note, I did not say everything should be open to public view or scrutiny. In the international development field, it is appropriate that some information shared by and with government clients should remain confidential. The argument, for advocates on all sides, is where that line in the sand should be. Why then is transparency so important? It leads, I believe, to better and more holistic outcomes. James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, offer his viewpoint on the subject. “I have made fighting corruption a core activity of the Bank’s agenda during my tenure,” he once said. “The key to fighting corruption is promoting transparency in developing countries. Transparency reduces opportunities for corruption. The reduction of corruption leads to good governance. Good governance leads to development. Transparency is the key.” I think that it a useful interpretation on the value greater transparency provides. In my next note, I will identify how transparency is interpreted by other actors in the development field and some of the key battlegrounds today.

Post-Busan group meet for the first time in Paris

Alex Beech — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:10:25 +0000

The Busan Partnership Interim Group (BPIG) met for the first time earlier this week in Paris to decide what the post-Busan architecture on aid effectiveness will look like. As well as looking at how the Busan Partnership will be implemented and managed, they are also making the important decision of what indicators will be used to monitor progress, and how these will be applied to the task at hand. One of the more popular options is a “country-heavy, global-light” mechanism that monitors progress mainly in a country-specific context. We’re keeping a keen eye on the proceedings and there are a number of key issues in this process that we feel need highlighting. Firstly, that any monitoring mechanisms used are targeted at a country level and with a small number of global indictors. It’s imperative that one of these indicators is transparency, as derived from the commitments made at Accra and Busan on transparency. Secondly, that whatever monitoring framework is used, it must be open and transparent. One way to ensure this would be to use an IATI – International Aid Transparency Initiative – approach, as opposed to the proposed monitoring survey. An IATI approach would mean that all involved parties would publish their own data in an open format to the IATI standard, as many have done in the past. All published data would then be collated to give a whole picture; this would be a far less cumbersome way of operating an open and transparent system than the use of a monitoring survey. The outcomes of this first meeting will be made public in March and we’ll be reporting on them here along with any recommendations we have for further amendments. The final draft proposal comes out in June and we’ll be covering the process on here until then... watch this space for the next instalment.

Launch of our Nepal Country Study

Victoria Room — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:30:14 +0000

This week we’re very excited to be launching work in Nepal. With the IATI standard now bearing fruit, we are increasingly turning our attention to how we can help make this information useful in aid recipient countries.

Last year, we worked with a group of interested organisations in Kathmandu to try and understand the nature of the demand for better aid information in Nepal. A series of workshops, a barcamp and a survey revealed a huge demand for information about aid. Specifically in five key areas:

More detailed information about where aid is spent in Nepal, when it is spent, how it is spent, what it is spent on, and who it is spent by.
Information that is accessible to all those who want to use it. This means information is translated into local languages, made meaningful for local contexts and uses appropriate methods and tools.
Analysis of aid information alongside other data, including looking at aid alongside other resources such as government revenue and demographic information
Capacity development and awareness raising to help different groups of people to find, understand and use information on aid that is relevant to them
Evidence and lesson sharing on the most effective methods and tools to improve the availability and accessibility of information about aid

We believe that meeting these demands requires an information ecosystem involving many actors; donors, governments, civil society organisations, parliamentarians, the media, academics and the intended beneficiaries of aid-funded projects all accessing and using the data in different ways and using this as a platform to advocate for improvements in how resources for poverty reduction are used. For the past four years we have been working with partners to find ways to catalyse and support such a system and suggest there are three essential elements:

Data that is available to everyone: data about aid should be published on the Internet according to a common, open standard
Information that is accessible to everyone: Information intermediaries are needed to make information accessible and useful for different groups of people
Capacity within organisations and individuals: to use the data and information for decision making and advocacy.

Our work in Nepal with five organisations (Freedom Forum, NGO Federation of Nepal, Alliance for Aid Monitor Nepal, CAHURAST and YIPL) aims to use this approach to find ways to:

Catalyse and support a community of organisations working to improve the transparency of aid and to meet the five demands identified during the scoping phase
Develop a set of tools and methodologies that can support the use of aid information in Nepal
Document and share policy-relevant evidence about the ways that an information ecosystem can be supported and developed, and the difference it can make.

Please watch this space for regular updates from us and our partners, download the concept note, or get involved by contacting Victoria at victoria@devinit.org

The open data revolution comes to aid – Guest blog from Owen Barder

Alex Beech — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:14:26 +0000

Today we have a guest blog from Owen Barder, well-known development blogger and Senior Fellow and Director for Europe at the Center for Global Development. More than two thousand delegates have gathered today in Busan, South Korea, for the fourth installment of a succession of meetings aimed at making aid more effective. There has been significant progress since the meeting in Accra in 2008 towards improving transparency of aid. This is important because it’s a pre-requisite for achieving all the aid effectiveness principles. Jamie Drummond from the ONE campaign explains this very well in the Huffington Post. The challenge is to provide information to people at country level. Our existing aid information systems are mainly designed to enable donors to share information with each other, not to meet the needs of people in developing countries. But the information needs at country level are hugely diverse, both between and within developing countries. Within governments, the information needs of the finance ministry are different from the needs of line ministries. The needs of parliamentarians, civil society, media and citizens are all different again. It is impractical for donors to try to meet the needs of every niche interest with their own subset of the data in a particular format. 뜻이 있는 곳에 길이 있다 (where there’s a will there’s a way) Here’s the technical bit: the way to serve all these different needs for information without massive duplication and bureaucracy is to separate the data from the interface. An open, standardised, detailed, shared data layer can support a whole range of different applications, tailored to specific users. That is why it is so exciting that the open data revolution is coming to aid. In 2008, in a side-meeting in Accra, a coalition of willing donors, developing countries, foundations and NGOs made a declaration which launched the International Aid Transparency Initiative. A lot of that data is now being published – countries accounting for nearly half of global aid are now publishing through IATI, and that proportion will grow in the coming months. If you are in Busan this week, and you want to know how IATI works, the IATI secretariat will be doing a briefing at 5pm on Wednesday, in room KW202 (I’m making a guest appearance to show off some beta software, so do come along and laugh at me when it doesn’t work). 천릿길은 한 걸음부터 (A 1000-li journey starts with one step) Transparency by itself does not lead to more accountability, less waste, or better coordination. That happens when people are able to use the information. The extent to which they are able to do so depends on their context, including the political and administrative climate. Open data won’t automatically make organisations responsive, but will greatly reduce the difficulty and cost for citizens of taking the data and turning it into something meaningful and useful. With an open aid data platform now in place, huge opportunities are being opened. We can use the standard to introduce traceability of aid as it passes from organisation to organisation. We can improve the quality and detail of the data that is collected and publish it through these systems. Reporting of aid data should be not just by donors but by NGOs, private sector implementing agencies and foundations. The mechanisms for sharing information can be extended beyond aid to other kinds of resources for poverty reduction. We can add detailed geo-coding, to enable aid projects and programmes to be mapped, and better coordinated. We can begin to compare across aid programmes and across countries. We can mix aid information with other data from other sources. The twenty four donors who have signed IATI should be congratulated for their efforts to make data available. The payoff from that effort will come when we all start to use the data to understand aid better: to see what is working and what is not, and to hold the aid system to account, so leading to improvements in the effectiveness of aid. IATI removes the most significant barriers to entry for a wide range of diverse applications. The next step is to nurture and encourage an ecosystem of civil society groups, parliamentarians, researchers, think tanks, academics, governments, private sector organisation, media and hackers, all accessing and using the information in different ways, and using this as a platform to push for improvements in how resources for poverty reduction are used. The new Open Aid Partnership is an example of an initiative of this kind: the door is now open for many more. We can now look forward to the day when we take for granted the ubiquitous availability of aid data. We will soon forget that it was ever a struggle to find out about aid projects in a developing country, or to follow the money through NGOs and implementing partners. Having laid these important foundations, we will be able to move on to much more important and exciting innovations which support people in developing countries to use and repurpose this information and use it to change their world.

Canada makes transparency announcement from Busan

Alex Beech — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:51:24 +0000

Exciting news from Busan, where Canada’s Minister for International Cooperation, Beverly Oda, has just announced that Canada has joined the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). This brings the total number of IATI signatories up to 23, including 13 bilateral donors, seven multilateral organisations, two global programmes and one foundation. Together, IATI signatories account for two-thirds of official development flows. Canada has been involved in IATI from the outset as an observer – the decision to join shows that IATI is gaining momentum. We’d like to congratulate Engineers Without Borders Canada, who have campaigned tirelessly for Canada to join IATI, and have shown their commitment to “walk the talk” by becoming one of the first NGOs to publish their own data to the IATI Registry. The aidinfo team at Development Initiatives have helped to develop and promote IATI because we believe that publication of aid information to a common, open standard will help everyone involved in the aid business do their jobs better, and ensure that aid achieves maximum impact on poverty. Access to aid information is also essential for parliaments, civil society organisations and citizens who want hold their governments to account for public expenditure – whether they are tax-payers in donor countries who want to ensure value for money, or representatives of communities receiving aid, who want to be able to track aid spending on the ground to ensure that funds reach those they are intended for. It’s clear from our recent case studies in Kenya that citizens and CSOs are increasingly demanding this information, and that organisations such as the Social Development Network (SODNET) are using the tools and networks available to people on the ground -including SMS, radio, church groups - to monitor service-delivery, and pass on complaints to policy-makers via the internet. This confirms that there is real demand for better aid information at country level, and that when people have access to that kind of information, they know how to use it. IATI has the potential to make that information available to them - what we need now is for more donors to embrace IATI’s approach and sign up to the initiative - we hope that others will do so this week in Busan.

Kenyans demand transparency about public spending

Matt Bartlett — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:49:55 +0000

Kenyan citizens are increasingly calling for access to clear and reliable information on public spending, including expenditure that is funded from international aid. Our latest collection of case studies and videos from Kenya attempts to increase our understanding of the issues facing citizens and civil society organisations (CSOs) who wish to access information about public spending, and who operate in a country where just over 10% of government expenditure comes from aid. It’s this knowledge that drives us forward towards the 4^th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan this week. A successful outcome for those who benefit from aid must include a specific, time-bound commitment to increase the transparency of aid information, and to publish that information in line with the common, open standard developed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative. This is a crucial step towards supporting citizens to hold their governments accountable for the way they spend public funds, including aid resources. When governments are more accountable, public spending is more effective and citizens are able to monitor and direct services that can greatly improve their lives. Angela Kageni is the Senior Programme Officer at Aidspan, a CSO based in Kenya. Aidspan work to, amongst other functions, track the flow of aid money from when it is dispersed to the point it reaches the ground. Kageni says:

Finding out how resources are being used at the country-level is a real challenge, but it is vital in making sure that what goes into the system is what comes out. It can be a bit difficult to track money right through the system. To be able to identify progress and analyse performance, and thus hold those using the money accountable, you need to know what money is coming in and how that money is being used.

Our new case studies illustrate these points only too well. By enabling ordinary people to use whatever means of communication are available to them – including mobile phones, local radio stations, places of worship and schools - CSOs in Kenya are witnessing a growing thirst for government accountability. Given the opportunity to report hospitals with no medicines, pumps with no water or schools with no teachers, people are stepping forward to register their complaints. Organisations like the Social Development Network (SODNET) are then analysing complaints against budgets and passing the information on to policy-makers via the internet. The National Taxpayers' Association (NTA), Twaweza and Uwezo also encourage people to monitor local spending on services like water provision, schools, health and infrastructure and to record their findings. The organisations are then analysing this information against government spending data and sharing it with policy-makers. By monitoring public spending, including the proportion funded by aid, the Kenyan people can ensure that they are benefiting from the services they are owed as citizens. Journalists like Luke Anami of Kenya's leading daily newspaper, The Standard, are getting involved and demanding more and better information. He says:

Often, even if information is available, it is not always accurate.

He calls on CSOs for information about public spending from the grass roots that is not available elsewhere. Reliable data about public resource flows in Kenya is not only hard to get hold of but is also often presented in a complex and inaccessible manner. Delays in the release of information about public spending – which may often be incomplete – further undermine timely analysis. Our new case studies highlight the demands of citizens and CSOs in developing countries for greater access to aid information. They illustrate what can be achieved when this need is met. And they challenge those who are meeting in Busan next week to take action on improving access to aid information. As Kwame Owino, CEO of the Institute of Economic Affairs, said:

The importance of accurate data can’t be overstated. We as civil society need to be able to contribute to the public debate about policy, while the public need it in order to hold the authorities to account and to participate in their own governance.

View our new Kenyan case studies and videos to find out more.