This blog was written by Sally Paxton and the Brookings Institution’s George Ingram. It first appeared on the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network website. Over the last almost ten years, the US has made a series of commitments to improve the publication of its aid data. Behind this effort is the concept that increases in transparency and availability of US data will lead to better planning, accountability, and effectiveness of US aid efforts. One of the latest steps in this data journey was taken when Congress passed the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act (FATAA) in July 2016. Additionally, on January 14, 2019, President Trump signed the Foundations for Evidence-Based Poli
Three years ago, 59 major humanitarian aid donors and implementers brokered the ‘Grand Bargain’ at the World Humanitarian Summit in May 2016. It had the ambitious goal of achieving $1 billion in savings to address the gap in humanitarian financing. This was to be achieved through a series of commitments in ten key areas. One of which was improved transparency of humanitarian spending. Significant gains have been made since then. According to self-reporting, by May 2018, 76% of Grand Bargain signatories or their affiliates, were publishing open data about their humanitarian activities using the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) global data Standard. However, the full potential
Our Aid Transparency Index seeks to assess the timeliness, comprehensiveness, and comparability of data from some of the world’s biggest aid donors. We will kick off data collection for the 2020 Index this December. Our recent blog sets out more details of the Index timetable. If you are one of the publishers included in the Index, we will provide you with initial scores at the start of the data collection period. This, we hope, enables you to prioritise what improvements you can and will make before the end of data collection. But there’s no need to wait until December. We have built several tools that will allow all IATI publishers to assess much of their data now. They are all free and av
