Transcript International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Overview Romilly Greenhill Aid Transparency Leader, DFID October 2010 Why improve aid transparency? • Fundamental to all 5 Paris Principles: – Ownership:

International Aid
Transparency Initiative (IATI)
Overview
Romilly Greenhill
Aid Transparency Leader, DFID
October 2010
Why improve aid transparency?
• Fundamental to all 5 Paris Principles:
– Ownership: need good information to plan and budget,
and involve citizens
– Alignment: better information critical for getting aid on
budget and aligning behind country plans
– Harmonisation: donors need good information about each
others’ plans to harmonise
– Mutual accountability: information critical for
accountability between donors and partners, and to
citizens
– Results: need information on inputs to be able to
effectively monitor outputs and outcomes
Why improve aid transparency?
• Strong demand from partners and CSOs
– Partner country consultations have expressed a strong demand for
better information on how, where, when, what and in which sectors
aid is spent, future aid flows, and other core areas
– Enhanced transparency is a consistent and strong demand from
northern and southern civil society organisations
• Enable citizens and parliamentarians to track aid flows and
ensure aid is put to most effective use
– Paris Declaration evaluation 2008 noted the ‘continuing serious
difficulties involved in securing and providing timely, transparent
and comprehensive information on aid flows that enable partner
countries to fully report on budgets to their legislature and
citizens. This basic contribution by donors to mutual
accountability is widely found to be missing or inadequate, even
in relatively strong systems’
• Enables donor country citizens to better understand how aid
is being used
Why a new initiative?
• Raise political profile and support to the
transparency agenda
• Opportunity to bring together diverse stakeholders
towards shared goal
• Build on, and add value to, existing mechanisms for
sharing information – in particular the DAC-CRS
• Focus on meeting the needs of stakeholders in
partner countries
• Help to meet the Accra transparency commitments
in the most coherent and consistent ways
• Ensure information made accessible to a wide range
of stakeholders
What does IATI aim to achieve? (1)
•
•
•
•
•
Meet information needs of developing country AIMS and
budgets, with local classifications
Develop common definitions and reporting processes, and
avoid parallel reporting
Provide easily relevant and accessible information for
governments, parliamentarians, civil society, the media and
citizens,
Provide accurate, high quality and meaningful information
(not statistics)
Provide information in ways which are easy to understand,
reconcile, compare, and read alongside other information
sources
What does IATI aim to achieve? (2)
• Include information from non-DAC donors,
multilaterals, foundations and NGOs
• Information published is legally open, with as
few barriers to access and reuse as possible
• Reduce duplicate reporting by donor agencies
and minimise additional costs
• Be electronically accessible in an open format
• Access to information about aid which is more
timely, more detailed, more forward looking and
more comprehensive
Reporting now – a view from donor
perspective
Donors already
publish to many
systems and
services
Donor
website
Treasury &
Parliament
DAC CRS
HQ
AIDA, PLAID,
TRAID, Donor
Atlas, etc
Journalists &
Researchers
Country
teams
Sectoral
working groups
FTS
• Significant
burden
AIMS
•Results in
inconsistencies
Line Ministries
Embassy
website
www.aidtransparency.net
BUT
Reporting now – a view from user
perspective
Donor
budgets
and
accounts
AIDA,
PLAID,
TRAID,
Donor Atlas,
etc
Donor
Donor
website
Donor
website
45 Donor
website
45 Donor
websites
websites
DAC CRS
FTS
Journalists &
Researchers
AIMS
Systems are
producer rather
than user oriented
Information can
be:
•hard to find
•inconsistent
Sectoral
working
groups
Line
Ministries
30 Embassy
or
Delegation
websites
www.aidtransparency.net
•scattered across
multiple sites
•unavailable
The worst of all possible worlds –
requiring a collective solution
Publish once, use often
Countries would not have to change their
classifications
www.aidtransparency.net
Benefits to donors
• Publish information once, rather than responding to multiple,
ad-hoc data requests, including under FoI legislation
• Improved understanding of citizens and parliamentarians in
donor countries – helps make the case for aid
• Demonstrate to constituencies that are tackling corruption
and ensuring that aid is well spent
• Better understanding of other donor activities at country level
• In some cases, improve information sharing between HQ and
country levels within donor agencies
• Publication can help to ensure better quality information
• Better information can facilitate higher quality research and
evaluation
• Stronger focus on results – help to understand what works
and what doesn’t
• Potential for greater automation of reporting over time
Benefits to partner country
governments
• More up to date information on current and future donor activities to
inform AIMS and strengthen planning and budgeting
• Reduced transaction costs through automation of data exchange
• Improve coverage and quality of information available
• Help to support AIMS by:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Making it easier for partners to collect and use aid information from donors
Ensuring information is public – many AIMS are not
Creating political pressure to ensure that donors report fully to AIMS
Ensuring more qualitative information is published
Promoting accessibility to stakeholders
Common definitions – to adapt locally where needed
• Meeting information needs of line ministries, not just finance and
planning
• Strengthen mutual accountability through improved information on donor
performance
Benefits to CSOs and
parliamentarians
• Access to much more detailed and up-to-date
information on donor spending
• More qualitative information available
• Improved ability to track use of resources and hold
donors and governments accountable
• Better able to participate in decision making
processes through improved information
• More and better information available on specific
areas through intermediaries
• More accessible information
What IATI will do
• IATI will support and add value to existing systems
like the DAC and AIMS, not undermine or duplicate
them;
• Develop a four-part standard for publishing aid
information;
• Partner countries will have access to more up-to-date
information on current and future aid allocations;
• Parliamentarians and CSOs will benefit from increased
access to more detailed and timely data to demand
accountability;
• Donors will publish their aid information once, rather
than respond to many requests;
• Information intermediaries will be able to collect data
automatically and offer a wider range of tailor-made
www.aidtransparency.net
What IATI will NOT do
• Duplicate the work of the CRS – which is designed for
a specific purpose
• Create a parallel set of definitions and classifications
- this work will only take place where no existing
classifications exist
• Design a new database – one database cannot meet all
needs
• Push a one-size-fits-all approach onto donors or
partner countries –
– Donors use existing systems and convert to IATI
format
– information published will be tailored to country
circumstances
• Strengthen partner country transparency – this is
important work, but is taking place elsewhere
www.aidtransparency.net
IATI governance & management
• Secretariat: DFID, UNDP, Development Initiatives for
Poverty Research (DIPR)
• Funding: Netherlands, Ireland, Finland, Switzerland, UK.
Australia, Germany, Norway
• Multi-stakeholder Steering Committee
• Multi-stakeholder Technical Advisory Group (TAG)
• Full IATI membership: donor signatories and partners
who have endorsed
• New ‘IATI observer’ category Partner country
consultations led by UNDP
• Civil society consultations led by Reality of Aid
Next steps
• Phase 1 standards agreed by IATI
signatories on 7th July 2010
• Phase 2 and 3 standards: aiming for
agreement by December 2010
• January 2011: ‘Early implementers’ will
start publishing in line with IATI
standards
• November 2011: Aim for all signatories
to implement phase 1 standards
Publish once, use often
www.aidtransparency.net