Claudia Schwegmann's blog
Somebody said mergers are a sign of consolidation and maturity. We do not know if that is true, but the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and OpenAid will merge! As of now, OpenAid will be the “development project” of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. We are confident, that this is a very good development. Read more »
2011 has been a good year for aid transparency and a good year for OpenAid. We want to make 2012 an even better year! We want to move beyond preaching aid transparency. Instead we want to really see it happening - in Germany, in other donor countries and most of all for citizens in developing countries. There are discussions and plans in the pipeline and we hope to be able to share interesting news soon. We hope that by the end of this year we will see a better coordination and sharing of knowledge and experience among open data and aid transparency activists. Read more »
The Worldbank estimates, that about 1.000.000.000.000 US Dollar is lost to corruption every year! Around the world the benefit of public spending, including aid, is severely reduced by corruption. The most corrupt sector, globally, is construction. According to Charles Kenny (2009) from the Center for Global Development construction firms spend a significantly higher part of their budget to gain contracts than other companies. Read more »
Last week PublishWhatYouFund (PWYF), the global campaign for aid transparency, released its 2011 Aid Transparency Index. This index rates the transparency of bilateral and multilateral donors against a set of 37 indicators at organisation, country and activity level. The assessment was done in collaboration with civil society organisations and donors were given the opportunity to react on the findings. Read more »
Development cooperation is often an issue of controversy in the press. This article by Deutsche Welle presents some critical views on international aid. In this context, former German MP and current board member of Transparency International, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, cites OpenAid as one positive initiative to promote transparency in development cooperation and reduce corruption.
To be honest, I do not care too much, if the next High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan next month produces a strong commitment to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) or not. The future of aid transparency will not be decided in Busan. There are three reasons for this. Read more »
13 Million people at the horn of Africa are facing hunger and it is expected that between 100.000 and 200.000 people will die from hunger until the end of this year. Every day more the 2000 people from Somalia cross the border into Kenya and arrive at the refugee camps in search of food and water. The international community and private donors are responding, but not enough. Much more help is needed to help aid agencies to get food to the people. Is this not the wrong moment to continue bickering over aid transparency? I do not think it is. Read more »
In an African country foreign donors meet on a regular basis with their counterparts of the partner country and discuss development policy. The representative of the lead donor privately calls this group of donors the shadow government of this country. In an Asian country one of the most prominent journalists and observer of national politics decries the strong negative impact of donors on the peace process and misguided priorities of donors resulting in misguided priorities of the government. Read more »
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Would anybody argue that aid transparency is a bad thing? Probably not. But what do you mean by aid transparency? Definitions of aid transparency may range from annual reports in pdf format to open access to donor databases. What type of aid transparency is necessary to improve the effectiveness of aid and how exactly does transparency of information make a difference? Read more »
In his recent op-ed in the New York Times Nicholas Kristof praised randomized trials are the "hottest thing in the fight against poverty“. This statement by one of the popular columnist on aid issues in the US sounds so wrong I don't even know where to begin. Let me begin with the assumption that the fight against poverty is hampered by a lack of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. This knowledge, Kristof and many others argue, can be created by randomized controlled trials. Read more »
Remember what the Queen and Nestlé have in common? They were both involved in a big public debate (at least in Germany) in 2009 on agricultural subsidies. And remember what sparked the big public debate? The publication of each individual recipient of farm subsidies in Europe! It showed that the Queen received about 700.000 US$ and Nestle nearly 2 million US$ in farm subsidies from European tax payers in 2009. Read more »
Nike sells shoes and wants you to buy them. To get you to buy their shoes, Nike will get its marketing experts to design a colourful advert, with attractive pictures and with some information about the quality of the shoe, its price and where you can get it.
The government provides services and wants you to use them. Of course that is a very optimistic assumption, but lets stick with it for a while. One of the services the governments provides is the publishing information about its work and inviting citizens to engage. City councils publish information about new building zone and about public investment plans. Government ministries publish information about their policy or their annual budget. In theory the idea is, that you and I access this information provided by the government and make use of it. Read more »
To publish public sector information in an open and accessible way for citizens and governments makes sense. This is way so many governments are doing just that. In this video by FutureGov.Asia Peter Harper from the Australian bureau of statistics explains how the Australian government views open data and which arguments are supporting their efforts to publish publicly held data. Read more »
I spend a good part of my waking hours thinking about, writing and working on aid transparency. But quite frankly, aid transparency is only peanuts. Globally there are 30 countries who receive more than 10% of their gross national income (GNI) from aid (Worldbank 2008). For only 12 countries the amount of official aid exceeds 20% of their GNI. So in the context of development and global poverty alleviation tracking revenues in extractive industries and monitoring national budget is much more important.
But aid transparency is not only one of many factors influencing the global fight against poverty. We should regard aid transparency also as part of a broader open data movement. Open government initiatives in the UK, the USA, Greece, Finland and Brazil, and the adoption of freedom of information acts demonstrate that there is a shift in the relationship between citizens and government administration. Read more »
It is very hard to make predictions about the impact of a conference. But given all we know about aid effectiveness and the potential of transparency it is very likely, that yesterdays meeting of the Steering Committee of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) in Paris is indeed a milestone for effective aid and for accountability towards citizens. After nearly three years of work and consultations representatives of donor agencies, partner countries and civil society organisations came together yesterday to agree on a transparency standard. Read more »
Whenever I make presentations about aid transparency some people in the audience will inevitably ask: “But surely, you don't want to publish everything?” In a recent workshop on aid transparency one researchers in development policy explicitly warned against “full disclosure” - some negotiations in development cooperation require secrecy, he suggested. At another occasion people in the audience worried that publishing salary levels of expatriate staff or freelance consultants would cause a lot of criticism among beneficiaries. Read more »
People who argue for more transparency in development cooperation are often eager to point out all the merits of transparency. Unfortunately, often we are not very sure whether our claims are well founded. Even worse, there are very few examples who can illustrate how exactly „more transparency“ could look like. Read more »
The parties are over and many of us start the new year with reviews of last year's achievements and and good intentions for the future. Stock-taking has also been high on the agenda in Germany's development cooperation in the last months. The Center for Global Development (CDG) published two different assessments related to governmental development cooperation at the end of last year. The Commitment for Development Index ranks donor countries overall behaviour related to developing nations. Criteria for this ranking are trade, security and migration policies, investment in environment, aid and technology transfer as well as policies promoting investment in developing countries.
The same US-based think tank also offers a more detailed analysis of the quality of aid given by bilateral and multilateral donors on their QuODA (quality of aid) website. The four main criteria of the QuODA assessment are 1) Maximising Efficiency, 2) Fostering Institutions, 3) Reducing Burden and 4) Transparency and Learning. The study of PublishWhatYouFund, a British NGO, focusses exclusively on this last aspect of the QuODA ranking, the transparency of international donors. Finally, the OECD DAC peer review of Germany at the end of last year has analysed German development cooperation in detail and offered recommendations for the coming years. So how well is Germany doing in all these assessments? Read more »
The International Aid Transparency Initiative has set out to develop a data standard to increase transparency in international development cooperation and facilitate access to information. In the past year several online consultations have taken place to invite suggests and feedback on which data donors should publish and in which way. Currently the final round of consultation takes place on the IATI consultation page. Read more »
What are the current priorities of German development cooperation? In a presentation held at a conference on aid effectiveness, coherence and coordination in German development aid Harald Klein, a senior BMZ representative, highlighted the investment in education and the reduction of structural deficits as important goals for the BMZ. The other four key priorities according to Klein are the involvement of civil society and private business partners, the implementation of the Paris and Accra process and finally, visibility and communication. Unfortunately, visibility, in the German Realpolitik of aid, is not about making the details of German aid more visible. It is not about aid transparency. Instead, it is about pointing out to the German taxpayers, how the investment of German tax monies successfully alleviates poverty.