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A Quarter of Aid is Transparent – What About the Rest? – Rupert Simons
00:17:03
The world's top aid donors committed to transparency. Who's delivered, and who still has a long way to go? Publish What You Fund CEO Rupert Simons shares the results of the 2016 Aid Transparency Index and discusses what needs to happen next in...
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Foreign Hello, I'm Rajesh Merchandani. Thanks for joining me for this edition of the CGD podcast. Now, secrecy is not often a good friend to politicians, as we've seen with the Panama Paper's revelations. Being open and transparent is demanded much more these days of our leaders and the decisions they make with their own money and our money. Increasingly, transparency is demanded in development too, and it helps development. Developing country officials can make better decisions about where to invest scarce resources and whether another country is, say, getting a better deal on something. Local NGOs and connected citizens can track the actual delivery of outcomes and hold decision makers to account. And rich country taxpayers can know more about how their aid money is being spent. Given the ambitious and universal nature of the SDGs, we need money to be as well spent as possible because it's going to take so much of it to achieve the goals. And we also need transparency because we need data, a data revolution, so that we know what works and what doesn't in making progress towards the goals. Here's what one development leader, Helen Clark, the administrator of the undp, said about transparency at an event at CGD recently.
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Transparency has the potential to transform the effectiveness of aid spending by supporting better informed decision making, improved trust and confidence in development work, more monitoring and accountability, and improved prioritisation of spending allocations by governments and development partners. The challenge for partners in development is for us all to keep on improving our performance on transparency.
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Now, every major donor organisation has committed to open their books in terms of how aid is being spent. The deadline for delivering on these political commitments was December 2015. And now we know who has delivered on these promises and who has not. Courtesy of our friends at Publish what yout Fund and their 2016 Aid Transparency Index, the leading global measure on the state of aid transparency. Publish what yout Fund CEO Rupert Simons is with me. Rupert, great to see you.
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Hi, Rajesh.
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Now you ranked 46 donors who between them account for 98% of official development finance between them. So what did you find?
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So what we found is approximately a quarter of all aid worldwide is now fully transparent. And that means that you can find information on activities, not just a website with pretty pictures and a map, but activities about what each donor is doing in each country in which they operate. So that's the good news. Quarter of aid is now fully transparent and five years ago almost none of it was, which obviously means 3/4, 3/4 is not. And there's a whole host of reasons for that. One reason which is legitimate is that if you're giving aid in a war zone, for example, to Syrian refugees, you sometimes need to be a bit cautious about publishing details of the recipient organizations so as to avoid making them targets. But aid to Syrian refugees still accounts for less than 5% of the total aid budget worldwide. So that 3/4, in our view, and in the view of our many independent reviewers and the many NGOs who partner with us, is unacceptable. We're supposed to be living in a data revolution and yet that data revolution isn't reaching most of the world's poorest people.
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So of the quarter of aid that is reported that is transparent, a couple of organisations, I mean you rank organisations and agencies, and a couple of them stand out as having done well on their commitments. Tell us a little bit about who's done well and who has not.
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So what we do is we look at the Data of these 46 leading organizations over a three month period and it's interactive, so we consult with them, what data we're going to look at, we invite them to contribute. And what we find is actually organizations of all shapes and sizes can do well at this. So topping the index this year, as indeed they did in 2014, is the United Nations Development Programme, the UNDP, and they get just over 90 out of a possible hundred points in our index. But you have other bilateral aid agencies as well. The second is the Millennium Challenge Corporation, headquartered right here in Washington DC. The third is UNICEF, another UN agency, and the fourth is the UK's own Department for International Development. But you also have some sector specific vehicles in there. So the Global Fund is fifth in our index. And we then have a whole swathe of multilateral and regional development banks, such as the World Bank's International Development association, their concessional lending window, and the Inter American, Asian African Development Banks and finally Sweden. So this incorporates organizations with offices in hundreds of countries around the world, organisations of all shapes and sizes delivering aid in all sorts of different ways. And that undoubtedly proves that full transparency is possible in aid and development.
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Did you rank USAID as one entity?
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USAID unfortunately doesn't make the top category of agencies. So we rank the US agencies separately. The Millennium Challenge Corporation is the highest performing US agency. USAID unfortunately only scores 59 out of a possible 100 points. And a number of other US agencies involved in aid, such as the State Department, treasury, the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR and the Department of Defence are also generally in that middle category, with scores in the in the 40s and 50s. And that's absolutely not good enough.
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Why did USID come out so low?
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There's a number of reasons and I would say that USAID is trying hard to do better here. I think what is holding them up is essentially systems being fully transparent means reconfiguring your information management from the ground up so that sharing and learning becomes a key principle of how you use information. And to date the US system has been geared to reporting up to Congress. It hasn't been looking out at the people who are supposed to be using the data benefiting from US aid. And from my own experience working in a number of developing countries with governments in countries like Liberia, Ethiopia, which receive a lot of US aid, it's a well known fact that the US aid agencies can be difficult to deal with because they they are oriented up their reporting to Congress and they are sometimes difficult for those countries to get a handle on. What are they really doing?
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Now we heard earlier from Helen Clark, her agency UNDP came top of your index. What are they doing so well that others can learn from? Or are they an example to follow? What are they doing that allowed them to score so highly?
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The reason UNDP comes top of the index is because UNDP is publishing data on every one of the fields of the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which is a global open data standard which publish what you fund, helped set up and has championed since 2008 and is essentially like a global accounting system for aid and development. You can think about it as a bit like a Wikipedia for the global aid industry. Historically we've always had the OECD which is like an encyclopedia. It's a historical record of the total amounts of money that people spend. What IATI on the other hand is doing is it's trying to give you up to date real time information on where aid is going and a lot more detail on the activities that these donors are undertaking. And UNDP comes top because UNDP is publishing high quality data and every one of the fields of the IATI standard.
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It's one thing to publish the data, it's then whether the data gets used. So who is using the data that agencies are publishing or is it being used enough?
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It's certainly not being used enough, but with the best performing agencies and UNDP is certainly one of them, they are using their own data internally. So our mantra here is publish once, use often. If you're using data for internal management decision making, that data should also be shared with your clients or your government counterparts. And the best performing agencies do that. However, the reason that IATIO is Really set up. And what motivates us at publish what you fund is trying to put information in the hands of decision makers. And here there are some countries that are starting to use open data and to import it to their own systems. Two examples we're familiar with are Bangladesh and Myanmar, which have both built open source aid management systems. And there are a number of countries, especially in West Africa, that have been importing IATI data to their own aid management systems. And the reason that's important is because historically aid management is done by sending spreadsheets around or calling the donors in your country and saying, all right, who's funding which sectors? And that only works if you have a good relationship with the. Whereas with IATI data you have access to what all the donors are doing and you can import that straight to your database. Now we don't know enough about how they're using it in practice. And here the biggest challenge is getting civil society to see that data and to feed into it. And this is where I think we in the open data and transparency community have a lot more to do to join up the data from the AID which we get through IATI with budget data, with open contracting data, which CGD fellow Charles Kenny has written about a lot, and also with extractives data. So that in a country like Ghana, which was represented on our panel here this week at CGD, is getting money from the IMF, from bilateral donors like UK's DFID, and from corporate social responsibility programs of the big oil companies who are investing in Ghana. All that information is available in one place for Ghanaian citizens to access. So we're not there yet, but we are an awful lot, way closer than was the case when we started this campaign seven or eight years ago.
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It sounds like we're a long way off from that point, are we?
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In some countries like Ghana, there is the political will to get it done. I think that the technology will follow quite swiftly. What we don't see is a global movement yet to be using open data for aid and development. We've got a global movement to publish it. We're in that movement. We don't see a global movement for data use yet. And that's why I keep bringing this back to the Sustainable Development Goals agreed last year in New York and to the data revolution. Because the whole point about the SDGS is, is that it is creating an equal relationship in the development landscape. So it's not the north doing things to the south anymore. It's a global partnership for development. And in order for the data revolution. To deliver that global partnership, we need global partnerships of data users and not just of data producers.
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Explain more about why you think people are not using the data that's available. As you say, there's it's at the heart of the SDGs. That's the kind of we need the data to achieve the SDGs. So why aren't people using what's available Now?
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I'll give you an example from Liberia, which is a country I know very well. I first went to Liberia in 2007 on a fellowship arranged by CGD's then senior fellow Steve Radlett. And I was working with the government to help reform the way the Ministry of Agriculture did its that it's budgeting and at the time the Ministry of Agriculture had an annual budget of $3 million and the donors were spending something like 30 million a year in agriculture. And it took me a while to figure out that this was going on. And I realized that one reason that the minister didn't particularly want people to know that there was $30 million coming in from aid is because if you told the Liberian legislature how much money was coming in the they would try to get a hold of that money and divert it to their own purposes. The minister felt if he kept tight control of the money he would have a better say over where it was spent and it would get better results. Now that didn't work out in the end because that minister eventually lost his job. And you might have seen in the news recently that another Liberian minister, the finance finance minister this time was very nearly arrested by his own parliament for attempting to cut their budget, their allowances. So Liberia and many other countries have huge domestic battles going on all the time about how money is used. So as transparency campaigners, we have to acknowledge that politics is sometimes an obstacle. It's not the case that everyone believes in transparency and what it will do for their, for their work. They may say they do, but in practice there are many political obstacles to using data. Let me give you another example. Ethiopia, which is a huge recipient of foreign aid and in general is held to do a very good job of how it uses that money, has an aid management platform which is developed for the government to be able to see and allocate aid money. And in spite of a number of donors and in fact the people who develop the software for that platform asking them, the government hasn't opened that platform up for its own citizens to see how the money's being used. So we can't short circuit domestic Political processes with transparency. What we can do is contribute to a culture of transparency that grows over.
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Time until we reach a kind of tipping point.
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Well, let me remind you of the history of our own countries here, Rajesh. The British government only started publishing its own fiscal accounts at the time of the Napoleonic wars when they needed that information to be available in order to allow them to go to the bond markets and borrow. And actually, whereas 10 years ago only one African country, South Africa, was borrowing on the international capital markets, now more than a dozen of them are. So there is absolutely pressure on the African governments who still haven't opened up their books to scrutiny to do so for the same reason that the British government opened its own books to scrutiny 200 years ago.
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@ the beginning, I mentioned the Panama Papers, which has been a big revelation in terms of how people kind of move their money around the world and what they do with it, personal money. But it's still part of this whole ecosystem of secrecy and non transparency. What link is there, if any, from the Panama Papers to the world of development? Or is it just, it just happens to be under the same umbrella?
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So there is one link that's really apparent which is that if the Panama Papers show that the global financial system is systematically rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, and that is true for people in rich and powerful countries as well as people in poor countries, what Panama Papers don't show is that aid is abetting, causing corruption. Actually, it's the opposite. The tax havens in which elites from around the world are hiding their money, often legally. By the way, this is not necessarily illegal activity. Those tax havens are typically either in developed countries or are closely linked to to developed countries. So let's forget once and for all this notion that aid is somehow causing corruption and that if we just stopped aid, corruption would go away. What we'd see from the Panama Papers is actually the problem starts at home. We need to fix it closer to home.
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Rupert Simons, really fascinating to talk with you. Thanks very much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you, Rajesh.
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You can find out, you can take a closer look at the Publish what you fund 2016 Transparency Index on their website.
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The address of that is ati.publishwhatyoufund.org There you go.
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And find out much more about everything that CGD does on our website, cgdev.org and please do join me, Rajesh Merchandani for the next podcast from the center for Global Development.