The Aid Transparency Index, which scrutinizes aid data from the biggest donors, is at risk of closure if it cannot find more funding by the end of the year.
The NGO that publishes the index is warning that this could cause a “catastrophic decline” in the quality of aid data because it will reduce pressure on donors to check and amend it.
The index is a biennial tool produced by Publish What You Fund, a U.K. nonprofit, which assesses data submitted to the International Aid Transparency Initiative by the world’s major aid agencies. The next edition will be published in July.
The IATI dataset currently consists of granular data on more than a million programs run by almost 1,500 major funders. It is used by a wide range of NGOs, researchers and multilateral and bilateral institutions to understand where and how money is being spent, and coordinate future activities.
However for that data to be useful, it must be provided in consistent, high-quality, and easily accessible formats.
To that end, the index looks at the data provided by around 50 of the largest institutions, such as bilateral donors, philanthropic organizations, and development banks, and provides feedback to improve it.
Companies are fibbing about their charitable giving, study finds
More should be done to compel companies to be honest about how much of the money earned from "cause marketing" campaigns is actually going to charitable organizations.
For the last decade, the index’s largest funder has been the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. However, the foundation is now ending its support, saying it wants to shift focus to the national level and do more to support governments to adopt and implement global standards.
The index costs around $300,000 a year to produce. It has other backers, including the U.K. government and the European Union, which said in a statement that the index has “notably influenced a shift from simple data publication to data use and engagement with users.”
But it will need to find more sources of funding by the end of the year if it is to continue its work.
Gary Forster, CEO at Publish What You Fund, said that aid data had gradually reached a quality where it could be used by many more researchers and institutions.
But he said his organization had gathered evidence showing that between editions of the index, the quality of data shared by donors significantly declined.
“Given the decade of effort and tens of millions of dollars invested in the systems and processes that have enabled the creation of this dataset, it’s unthinkable that we could be facing a catastrophic decline in data quality for want of a mechanism that costs a fraction of that,” he said. “We therefore hope that those governments and other development actors who value transparency and who use this information will step forward and support the continuation of the Aid Transparency Index.”
The International Aid Transparency Initiative said it would not fund the index itself as it values the index’s “independence.” It plans to establish a similar index of its own, although Forster questioned whether it would be able to provide the same level of scrutiny.
About the author
David Ainsworth@daveainsworth4
David Ainsworth is business editor at Devex, where he writes about finance and funding issues for development institutions. He was previously a senior writer and editor for magazines specializing in nonprofits in the U.K. and worked as a policy and communications specialist in the nonprofit sector for a number of years. His team specializes in understanding reports and data and what it teaches us about how development functions.
