'Donors dither on transparency vow'

Dhaka, Nov 17 — A global campaign group says international aid donors are backing out of aid transparency promises, a UK newspaper reports.

UK-based campaign group Publish What You Fund told the London newspaper Financial Times the latest draft of the 'Outcome Document' to be agreed upon at a key international meeting on aid effectiveness showed some governments backsliding on commitments they have made.

At previous summits, the donors had promised more transparency, reduction of the practice of tying aid to purchases from the donor country and streamlining the bureaucracy by using recipient countries' financial and administrative systems.

Karin Christiansen, managing director of Publish What You Fund, told Financial Times on Tuesday, "Over the last couple of weeks, some donors have been trying to water down commitments on transparency. The current draft outcome document betrays a lack of ambition and an inclination among donors to defer to the lowest common denominator."


Ahead of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea from Nov 29 to Dec 1, the campaign group released a report ranking 58 donor countries and agencies on their performance.

The Publish What You Fund report ranks donors according to how much information they provide across 37 different indicators. The average score of 34 percent shows that although some donors have made good progress, the majority need to do much more.

"These results are very disappointing. Most donors are simply not providing enough good information about their aid," Christiansen said.

Christiansen also cited some specific examples that they stumbled upon in the course of research, to hammer her contention:

• Almost the only information available about one of France's biggest aid beneficiaries, Cote d'Ivoire, related to a project commemorating 20 years of research into chimpanzees;

• Greece provided no information about its current aid activities, but an annual report from 2009 included pictures of a half-built block of flats in Serbia as evidence of an 'implemented project'; and

• Austria is the fourth biggest recipient of Austrian Development Agency aid according to the government's database of 'agreed contracts'.

"This lack of transparency leads to waste, overlap and inefficiency. It impedes efforts to improve governance and reduce corruption and makes it hard to measure results. At a time when overseas aid budgets are under pressure, transparency and accountability matter more than ever," she added.

Major donors including the US, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Canada, Italy and Australia perform poorly in Publish What You Fund's ranking.

The five best-ranked donors are the World Bank's International Development Agency, the Global Fund, the African Development Bank, the Netherlands' Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID).

The 15 worst-performers (Spain, Portugal, US Department of Defense, UK Commonwealth Development Corporation, Latvia, US Treasury, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, China, Greece, Cyprus and Malta) all scored less than 19 percent, with the bottom two scoring 0.

The report called on all donors to sign up to and implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which provides a common standard for publishing data and aid management.

It was in 2008 forum in Ghana where the IATI was developed.

Robin Ogilvy from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the intergovernmental body organising the forum, told Financial Times that recipient countries would continue to put pressure on donors to commit to better aid.

"Developing countries have become much more vocal and actively involved in negotiations," he said. "Countries deeply affected by aid effectiveness like Rwanda, Mali, Bangladesh and Honduras have all been active and engaged."

bdnews24.com