aid

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 »

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 »

Good news for IATI  today as The Hewlett Foundation became the second donor to publish to the IATI standard, releasing data on their global development and international population grantmaking.
 
The Foundation’s move to publish their data to IATI is part of a trend of foundations that have expressed interest and support for IATI. As we have reported previously, the Gates Foundation has said it will take steps to publish more detailed and timely data consistent with IATI standards. Meanwhile, the U.S.-based Foundation Center has recently become involved in IATI’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) and is working on mapping its own reporting standard to the IATI standard, with funding from the Hewlett Foundation.
 
Like many other US foundations, Hewlett already provides significant data to the Foundation Center, so there is nothing new in the content of the data that is being released today. IATI’s added-value is that the data is now being published in an internationally agreed, open, common format. This will enable more organisations to access, compare and combine it with other data sources in a myriad of ways to meet individual needs. Read more »

We’re hoping for a major step forward on aid transparency today, as signatories and Steering Committee members of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) meet in Paris to agree the remaining items to be included in the IATI Standard. Read more »

In July, representatives from international donor agencies, development country Governments and civil society organisations met in Paris to talk data. As topics go, it might not be the most riveting, especially among a group of interlocutors more used to discussing life-and-death issues that affect the poorest parts of the world. But agreed standards of data could be the tiny key which unlocks a very large gate on the path to more efficient, more effective aid. Read more »

Participation has for a long time been a popular buzz word in development cooperation. In reality however citizen involvement often seems to be considered a "nice to have". A recent report by the British NGO INVOLVE approaches the issue of participation from a different angle and argues the complexity of most social problems in development cooperation and in social policy generally cannot be adequately addressed by planning of some experts. Read more »

In May 2010 the new British Prime Minister wrote an open letter to all government urging them to open up data. "Greater transparency across Government" according to Cameron "is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account; to reduce the deficit and deliver better value for money in public spending; and to realise significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data." Following this commitment of the Prime Minister to transparency, the British Development Ministry (DIFD) published an aid transparency guarantee on its website to allow British taxpayers and citizens in poor countries to hold them to account and to provide feedback on DFID services. Read more »