Opinion: Aid agencies should be more transparent to taxpayers

The movement for aid transparency has led to an increased amount of data provided by aid agencies, yet it isn’t data that is always easy for citizens to access and act on. Our recent research encourages aid agencies to publish more accessible information on their actual websites, in an effort to galvanize taxpayer support for aid and development programs. Since the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008, aid agencies have come under increasing pressure to be transparent about how and where they spend aid money. The most visible is the regular publication of the Aid Transparency Index by the United Kingdom-based NGO Publish What You Fund. This has helped put aid transparency on the agenda and establish strong norms around aid transparency. But a piece of the puzzle is still missing: How transparent are aid agencies to their taxpayers? Government transparency and the open government movement are about increasing citizens' access to information in order to improve government accountability and increase public trust. Yet, existing measures of transparency focus on how much data is uploaded to international databases, not how easy to view and use that data then is, nor how much it is in fact being accessed and acted on. In a recent publication in the Journal of International Development, we fill this knowledge gap with the Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset, or CATD — a unique data collection effort that measures the transparency of 212 bilateral aid agencies from 37 Development Assistance Committee donors using only the public face of aid agencies: their own websites. Here’s why it is so important to be transparent with taxpayers in donor countries — and how to improve aid transparency to citizens. Transparency to citizens Aid transparency is part of a wider moment to increase transparency in public institutions. The precise meaning of transparency is contested. But scholarship on transparency consistently emphasizes that it is transparency to citizens that is essential, because the ultimate goals of transparency are government accountability and greater public trust. As public institutions, aid agencies are ultimately accountable to taxpayers, as they support and fund those aid agencies via elected officials. In practical terms, if we want to increase aid funding, we need to convince citizens that aid matters — and for that to happen, citizens need to know what aid agencies are doing. While databases like the International Aid Transparency Initiative serve to set data standards and measure how much data is shared, the average citizen is unlikely to be familiar with these types of databases. Transparency measures based on compliance with global data standards therefore miss the fundamental reason behind the push for public institutions to be accountable. Measuring aid transparency to citizens The Citizen Aid Transparency Database is designed to assess what aid data citizens can easily access about their own governments. It shows how much and what type of information aid agencies publish on their websites, and provides data on how accessible such information is. Our hope is that making the gaps in transparency visible will incentivize aid agencies to publish more and better data on their websites in the future. Despite the general commitment of most donors to greater transparency, the CATD suggests that the level of accessibility of their data to taxpayers varies greatly. First, transparency varies from country to country: Northern European donors tend to score higher than their counterparts in southern Europe, North America, and East Asia. Second, transparency varies even more within donor countries. For example, while Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, or BMZ, ranks fifth, the Federal Foreign Office, or AA, ranks 87th. These results suggest that transparency is not tied to country-specific norms of transparency but can be actively promoted by the leadership of aid agencies. Finally, aid transparency differs systematically according to the type of implementing agency. We find that a country’s agencies whose primary mandate is to manage development cooperation are the most transparent. By contrast, secondary agencies, often line ministries that are responsible for managing sector-specific foreign aid, score much lower. Export credit agencies are at the bottom of the distribution, while development finance institutions are significantly more transparent than the rest. The way forward We hope our research will raise awareness among donor agencies that transparency starts at home. In the wake of rising populism in the global north, the consensus for foreign aid is under threat. It is more important than ever to be clear about what donors are doing to advance development around the world. Policymakers who want to invest in greater aid transparency should consider three simple measures: First, all aid-delivering ministries should report on their international activities. This is increasingly important as donors move away from delivering aid through a lead ministry and instead disperse their support more widely across government. Second, beyond “dumping” their data online, donors must also invest in capacity to present the data in a more user-friendly format and help citizens understand what the data tells them about foreign aid. Third, aid transparency efforts should include subnational governments, which are key players in the growing efforts to localize aid delivery and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.