IATI - the hidden transparency process

In order to promote aid transparency and aid effectiveness, international aid donors agreed to develop standards on aid information and on how to publish aid information in a timely, detailed, accessible way. This process of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is geared towards defining information standards, technical formats and definitions and is ongoing since 2008. Unfortunately, except for the IATI website, there is hardly any information about it on the internet. On the websites of most signatories of IATI, there is no reference to this important initative to promote transparency in the aid business. In September 2008 the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) was initiated by the UK and the Netherlands. After several years of work on the aid effectiveness agenda, donors had come to acknowledge the need for transparency in development cooperation in order to promote the key objectives of the Paris Declaration: mutual accountability, ownership, alignment, harmonisation and management for results. Since 2009 bilateral and multilateral donors are elaborating standards to make up-to-date, detailed, comparable information about aid transactions publicly and easily accessible. While this commitment is important, it is interesting to note, that there is hardly any knowledge about IAIT among development practitioners and experts, let alone among the general public. It could be assumed that putting aid transparency high on the donor agendas would imply information about the IATI process to rally support for this process within donor agencies and beyond. However, if you would enter "IATI" into the search function of the IATI signatories, you would be surprised! DFID, the British aid agency, is lead agency for IAIT, so you get a good number of documents on their site. The Netherlands hosted the IATI conference last autumn, so on their website, you will find the opening speach of the Dutch development minister. On the site of the German BMZ there is also one hit. For all the other bilateral donors, there is no reference to IATI on the websites, not the IATI declaration of Accra, not reports produced in the IATI process, no minutes of meetings, nothing. There are a couple of multilateral signatories of IATI. The worldbank actually provides a large number of documents on IATI, but for the other multilateral donors and foundations there is very little transparency about this transparency process. It could be argued, the standards on aid data, that are to be defined, are not yet ready, the IATI product is not ready. But standardising aid information across a large number of donors is not a small feat. It involves considerable organisational change within the donor agencies and the administrative obstacles will be important. For this challenge the participants of the IATI process should rally all the support they can possibly get - including pressure from the public to move ahead in the transparency process. As long as nobody knows about IATI support will be hard to come by.

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