Root, root, root — for transparency

When the 2014 Aid Transparency Index is published Wednesday, die-hard transparency fans will be checking to see if U.S. agencies delivered on their IATI commitments. A joint opinion by the three co-chairs of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.

By George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, Connie Veillette // 08 October 2014

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. With the release of Wednesday’s ranking, we will be looking closely at where the evaluated U.S. agencies fall. Will the Millennium Challenge Corp. keep the top spot? Will PEPFAR (ranked “very poor” in 2013) and the State Department and Department of Defense (both ranked “poor”) have made any significant improvements? There is reason to be hopeful. This year, PEPFAR, the State Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services started to publish data to the dashboard. The U.S. Agency for International Development is in the process of conducting a pilot study on how aid data is being used in three partner countries in order to better inform their own thinking on transparency. And the dashboard recently moved to publish data to the common XML International Aid Transparency Initiative standard, making U.S. aid data easier to use and of better quality; and last week began to roll out a newly redesigned and more user friendly website. But a lot of data is still missing and the U.S. still has much work to do before meeting its IATI commitment a little over a year from now. As die-hard fans of transparency, we look forward to digging into the results on Wednesday; and to seeing whether the high-level commitments the U.S. has made to transparency are making it a real contender on the global stage. Join the Devex community and access more in-depth analysis, breaking news and business advice — and a host of other services — on international development, humanitarian aid and global health.

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.

The views in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect Devex's editorial views.

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.