IATI agrees on Phase I standards for more aid transparency

On the 7th of July 2010 the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) steering committee met in Paris to determine the scope of phase I of the IATI agenda, launched at the Accra High Level Forum three years earlier. The steering committee meeting was a first major milestone in this initiative and produced first tangible results. At the same time, the negotiations of the details clearly demonstrated that promises for aid transparency are a considerable organisational and political challenge and that strong political leadership and public awareness are needed to implement these promises.

The objective of the meeting was to agree the first set of standards and timetables to implement these standards. While data standards and timetables may not seem exciting, they hold the potential to increase accountability and improve the aid system. Major issues of discussion were the degree of aid information detail to be published until November 2011, the possibility of donors producing forward looking data, the validity of data and the frequency with which donors report should report aid information.

While some donors, particularly Germany, questioned the value of transaction level data, representatives of aid recipient countries and of civil society organisations stressed the importance of detailed aid information. Recipient countries governments need detailed data for their overall financial planning and for sectorial planning, citizens and parliamentarians in donor and recipient countries cannot hold managers and politicians to account without detailed data. The representative of Sierra Leone argued that corruption and waste cannot be detected without detailed information on financial transactions and that donors themselves need this information – without detailed public information about aid finances donors are creating an enabling environment for corruption.

For planning reasons forward-looking data is critical to the aid transparency agenda. However a number of donors expanded on the technical and legal difficulties to provide such data. According to CSOs and recipient country representatives forward-looking data need not be validated statistics. Instead it should reasonably accurate to be used as management information. PublishWhatYouFund held that ideally reporting of donors should be in real-time. In the same vein representatives of recipient countries such as Malawi, Kosovo and Colombia argued that monthly reporting by donors is necessary to manage the aid flows at a national level and that in some cases donors already provide monthly information. Most donor representatives pointed towards the technical and organisational challenge that monthly reporting represents and held that in the short-term only quarterly reporting is possible. Donor representatives highlighted that the costs of publishing aid data should be considered in relation to its expected benefit. CSOs and recipient countries countered that aid transparency is an issue of mutual accountability addressed in the Paris agenda. In addition, the benefit of aid transparency is yet difficult to assess in financial terms.

As a result of these discussions the steering committee agreed on the recommendations for phase I elaborated by the technical advisory group of IATI with some amendments. Most importantly it was agreed that each donor should draft an individual implementation plan describing when the standards are to be implemented, which data elements will not be published before the next High Level Meeting in November in Seoul 2011 and what the reasons for these exceptions are.

Attached are the Minutes of the Meeting, a position paper by CSOs and the final version of the phase 1 standards.