After three years working in Ethiopia, Owen Barder relocated to Washington last month to become a senior fellow and director for Europe at the Center for Global Development. Before assuming his current post, Barder blogged about lessons learned on aid transparency and steps to achieve meaningful aid transparency. Here are five of his 10 suggestions:
1. Donors cannot achieve meaningful user-centred transparency just by putting project data on their websites.
2. Any organisations which do not implement IATI voluntarily should be pushed to do so by the organisations and people who fund them.
3. Donors, foundations and NGOs should ‘eat their own dogfood’ – that is, any information on their website and any analysis and data that they publish about aid should use be based on the publicly available data infrastructure.
4. But donors’ priority should be getting their own house in order by publishing their information in a reusable format, since this is something only they can do, and using that public data infrastructure themselves, before they help others to do so.
5. One of the highest priorities for new information about aid is that all aid spending should be classified in future according to the recipient country budget classifications as well as agreed international classifications.
Re-published with permission. Read the full blog post.
