Australia, Sweden, the United Nations Development Program and the Inter-American Development Bank have ramped up their commitments to make aid information more transparent in separate new actions and initiatives announced just days ahead of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.
Transparency and aid predictability are among the priority topics to be discussed at the forum, which is expected to attract more than 2,000 delegates from the public, private and nonprofit sectors. HLF4 will be held Nov. 29 to Dec. 1 in Busan, South Korea.
Australian Minister of Foreign Affairs Kevin Rudd, who is among the expected delegates in Busan, outlined on Wednesday (Nov. 23) a transparency charter for the country’s aid program. The charter will be implemented by the Australian Agency for International Development through the following steps:
Regular updating of information and data about country program activities.
Full participation in the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Publication of local language summaries of AusAID programs in local media and on websites of major AusAID programs.
Publication of annual targets for increased transparency within AusAID.
An increase in the number of documents published in AusAID’s Information Publication Scheme.
Solicitation of public feedback on the charter and AusAID’s performance against it.
“The charter will make Australia one of the most transparent aid donors in the world,” Rudd said in a speech to Parliament, where he unveiled the charter.
Meanwhile, IDB is set to sign the IATI, joining 21 other donor countries and institutions that have committed to publish their aid information to the initiative’s common standard.
Sweden and UNDP, both IATI signatories, are among the latest to publish their aid information to the initiative’s online registry, an internationally agreed and voluntary standard that aims to make information about aid spending easier to find, use and compare.
UNDP also launched a new open data portal where the public can access information about the program’s latest fiscal period as well as data on UNDP-administered multidonor funds.
Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.
