Open Data
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 »
Presentation on open aid data and IATI for internal workshop of Transparency International Germany
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 »
Today, I cannot but be a fan of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister! Cameron himself called today's announcement "a land mark event in the life of this and all future governments". Today Cameron instructed his cabinet to release data about public services in Britain: schools, general practitioners practices, hospitals, courts, prisons, the transport system, etc.!
Watch his speech on YouTube about why the British government is committed to transparency and what more open data means for British citizens! Once data about public services is open, Cameron explained, people will be able to make informed choices on which services to use. They will be able to compare schools according to criteria such as exam results and truancy rates. They will be able to compare doctors with regard to customer service and health outcomes of their patients. Read more »
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 »
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 »
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
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 »
IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative started in September 2008 in Accra, is now open for business! In July 2010 the first decisive step ahead was made by the IATI Steering Committee, who adopted the standards for the first implementation phase. By now also the beta version of the registry for aid data is online and functioning, so that donors can upload data and thereby make it more accessible to a wider audience. The Worldbank, UNDP and DFID have been among the first to uploaded data. But also data from the Global Fund, the Netherlands and Spain can be found in the registry. The goal of IATI is for most signatories to publish some data via the registry until the next High Level Meeting in Busan in 2011.