"The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many."
John Naisbitt, researcher and author on Megatrends
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 »
Ende September 2011 fand die Open Aid Data Konferenz in Berlin statt. Nur wenige Wochen vor dem 4. High Level Forum über die Wirksamkeit von Entwicklungszusammenarbeit im südkoreanischen Busan kamen auf dieser Konferenz Datenaktivisten und Entwicklungsexperten zusammen, um über die Veröffentlichung, die Nutzung und den Mehrwert von Daten in der EZ debattieren.
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 »
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 »
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 »
Yesterday Karin Christiansen and Tony Tujan from the Reality of Aid network presented the petition of the global "Make Aid Transparent" Campaign to the OECD. Over 5000 signatures from all over the world were collected to support the campaign. Watch the excellent animation explaining the need for more transparency!
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 »
More evidence vs more
More evidence vs more application of existing knowledge?
Thanks for this great post. I was dismayed with the Kristof piece for precisely the same reason.
The "knowledge uptake" problem (e.g. application of the evidence that already exists, somewhere or other) is significantly worse, in my view, than the "lack of evidence problem". RCTs are oversold, as you suggest, as a solution to the latter. They, nor any other research methodology, address the former. And I see the need for much much more attention to the former problem.
April Harding
Hello, I would like to make a
Hello,
I would like to make a clarification for myself. Is this a post about how RCT's are overrated and not the "hot" thing because of arguments mentioned above and that the "hot" thing is "perseverance in pursuing structural changes and helping the poor to take an active role in the negotiations." Could you expand on this, with very concrete example. I think I know what you are referring to but rather not misinterpret
Also, as you mention RCTs are helpful but not the magic bullet. I think a lot of people can agree with that. However, there is a lot of RCTs done by organization to identify very specific things, and other ran by some social scientist who help design theories that could help bigger changes. Do you agree with this last statement or not necessarily?
Thanks
(Sorry for the English - non-native speaker)
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 »
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 »
Linking Development Data
Great write up Claudia. You may be interested to learn about Linking Development Data http://goo.gl/f6HcY.
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 »
Great article! You are
Great article! You are mentioning the interview with the German development minister and at some point he says something along the lines of 'too detailed transparency requirement would distract staff from real project-related work'; nonsense, of course. Transparency is an essential part of 'real' work of governments, even if it means setting up a 'fancy' (really meaning accessible) website for their information. Right now, most governments don't want to engage in a discussion over their core 'currency' and knowledge, i.e. how money is spent; workshops on education, business's involvemnt in development etc. anytime, because they have no impact on policy-making, but please no discussions about money with well-informed citizens or civil society.
The Swedish Foreign Ministry went online a few days ago with a new website - which is also called openaid! After a commitment in 2010 to make Swedish aid more transparent, this website is one important step ahead in Swedish development cooperation more accessible for Swedish tax payers. The website contains information about the overall spending of the Swedish government on aid, its geographic and its sectoral distribution. openaid.se also provides information about the implementing channels of Swedish aid and project documents. Read more »
Norad (Norwegian Agency for
Norad (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) launched a similar site in January this year. So far its just available in norwegian, but it seems to have been a major source of inspiration for the Swedish site.
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 »
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An excellent discussion on
An excellent discussion on the actual merits of the new data to be released can be found on the Guardian's website http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/07/government-transpare...