We at the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network have been eagerly anticipating the beginning of October. Not just because of playoff baseball and the possibility of a Beltway Series, but because with we get the release of Publish What You Fund’s latest Aid Transparency Index, a comprehensive ranking of international donors’ commitment to transparency.
Earlier this year MFAN released a refreshed policy agenda where we prioritized accountability through transparency, evaluation and learning as a powerful pillar of aid reform. More recently, we put together a two-pager that details why transparency is so important to ensuring that U.S. foreign assistance has maximum impact. When it comes to transparency, we believe that high-quality, accessible, timely and usable data on how aid dollars are being spent can drive accountability — both in the U.S. and in partner countries.
The U.S. government has made notable progress in recent years to demonstrate its commitment to transparency. The Foreign Assistance Dashboard was launched in 2010 as a way to present budget and appropriations data on agencies doing foreign assistance. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the U.S. was committed to fully implementing the International Aid Transparency Initiative by the end of 2015.
About the authors
George Ingram
George Ingram is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; a board member of MFAN and USGLC and chair of Friends of Publish What You Fund; with a career in development spanning U.S. Congress, USAID, and civil society.
Carolyn Miles
Carolyn Miles is president and CEO of Save the Children and co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network. After starting out as an entrepreneur and working in Hong Kong for American Express, Miles joined Save the Children in 1998 and was also COO from 2004-2011.
Connie Veillette
Connie Veillette is a senior fellow for global food security and aid effectiveness at The Lugar Center and co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.
