In December — in response to concern from members of the European Parliament about how many development contracts were being awarded to a handful of European national development agencies — the European Commission released data detailing the contracts awarded to these bodies between 2010 and 2019.
The commission disburses aid funding in two ways: Direct management, where it manages the contract directly with the final recipient, typically through a competitive bidding process; and indirect management, where the EU funds are trusted to an intermediary organization — typically an international organization or bilateral agency — to manage.
These indirectly managed funds are harder to track because, while the intermediary is obliged to publish information about the funding received, there is no central system for this. That’s where this new data set fills a gap in knowledge.