IATI
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 »
Vortrag am Gustav-Stresemann Institut in Bonn
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 »
The Open Aid Data Conference on the 28th and 29th of September has been a success. This great event would not have been possible without the strong support of our partner organisations. Aidinfo in the UK has been supporting the conference through sponsoring and by offering a free training on data analysis. Isabel Bucknall has been part of the aidinfo team at the conference. In the following blog post she describes her take on the event. Read more »
On the 29th of September OpenAid and its partner organisations the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Transparency International Germany and the Heinrich Böll Foundation organised the Open Aid Data Conference in Berlin bringing together for the first time the development community and the open data community in Germany. Keynote speaker of the conference, Prof. Read more »
Isn't the need for aid transparency obvious? How come this issue is still not very high on the agenda of advocacy groups and aid experts across Europe? One reason certainly is, that people did not think about it too much and that those initiatives that try to improve aid transparency are not well known, even in the so called aid community. 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 »
Breakfast meeting of representatives of civil society, government administration and international organisations in Paris in preparation for Busan. Focus will be aid transparency and development effectiveness.
Registration is now open!
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 »
Reflections on a recent online debate with Dirk Niebel. How does development cooperation change in the age of digital media? This is the question Cherno Jobatey, a well known German journalist ask Dirk Niebel (German Minister for Economic Development and cooperation) and Till Behnke (co-founder of betterplace.de a German micro funding platform) in a recent online debate.
The good news is Niebel confirmed his support for transparency in development cooperation in this debate. The minister even welcomes the degree of transparency possible through the betterplace approach. "I wish, Niebel said, "that we in governmental development cooperation would be so advanced and could allow people to look into projects and see how a project has evolved so far". This would increase transparency and reduce the risk of failure, Niebel added. 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 »
Personally, I am a "true believer" of the merits and beauty of aid transparency. But often people ask me, what all this standardised, open data can be used for. In the following guest blog, Mike Tierney, director of the international relations program at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and a principal investigator for the AidData initiative, gives one example of how data can help to analyse USA aid allocation in recent years. Read more »
German transcript of the letter from Gudrun Kopp, secretary of state, to the parliamentarian Thilo Hoppe. The original answer can be found in the attached document.
Schriftliche Fragen Nr.: 1/28 und 1/29 vom 06.Januar 2011
Sehr geehrter Herr Hoppe, Ihre schriftliche Fragen beantworte ich wie folgt: Read more »
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)and its standard have been a recurrent theme of this website, because we believe that this is a very concrete and relatively simple measure with great potential to improve aid effectiveness.
Again and again OpenAid has been explaining the merits of IATI and its implementation online, in workshops and in discussions with stakeholder. Below you will see, how the IATI Standard actually looks like. After long consultations and discussion the list of information items has been agreed at the IATI Steering Committee meeting in Paris on the 9th of February 2011. The standard is divided into a section on a donor organisation and a section on the activity level, including information on implementing agency, project area, project sector and financial flows. This is the first version of the standard and it may be updated after some time.
IATI Standard Version 1
A. Organisation Information
- Area Annual forward planning budget data for agency
- Annual forward planning budget data for funded institutions
- Organisation documents (Those already published until end of 2011; after this date other documents)
- Annual forward planning budget data for countries
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 »
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 »