As Owen Barder, who attended the meeting, acknowledges, changing organizational infrastructure and culture will not be easy. However, transparency is important for development projects because their effectiveness *might* improve if each aid agency knows what the others are doing, recipient governments can see the whole picture, and public watchdogs can hold them all accountable.
Why do I say *might*?
We are increasingly awash in information. Information availability used to be the binding constraint. But now we are on the brink of information overload, and the constraint is increasingly usability and incentives rather than availability.
Over the fifteen years I spent in the official aid sector (primarily at the World Bank, but also at USAID and the Asian Development Bank), I worked on millions of dollars of initiatives designed to increase the availability of information about aid projects. In Indonesia, we did a giant database of all the coconut, rubber, and palm oil projects being funded by the various aid agencies. In Russia, the G-7 was so concerned about poor aid coordination and duplication that they ordered the Bank to create a database of everything that was happening.
What was the net result of these initiatives? Nada. No change in behavior. In each case, we made a Herculean effort to get the data into the database and distributed, but to my knowledge no agency changed what it did or how it did it. And in both cases, the database efforts collapsed after about six months - both from lack of use as well as lack of incentive for anyone to provide the data.
While I don’t have hard and fast data, I would guess that about 80-90% of information initiatives fail to achieve their intended effects -i.e., fail to change behavior so that some underlying phenomenon is improved. For these initiatives to work, they require a combination of factors - the right information, gathered from the right sources, displayed through the right user interface, to the right people, at the right time. Will the participants at the IATA meeting get all these right? Are the right incentives in place? Stay tuned...
3 comments:
From Karin Christiansen, Director of Publish What You Fund, the global campaign for aid transparency. (email: Karin.christiansen@publishwhatyoufund.org)
Dennis, these are good points and worth raising and I’d just like to explain why Publish What You Fund is working with IATI to ensure it addresses a number of them. As the global campaign for aid transparency, we are a member of the IATI Steering Committee, along with with Transparency International, International Budget Partnership and Betteraid.
You say, “We are on the brink of an information overload, and the constraint is increasingly usability and incentives rather than availability.” The key purpose of IATI is to ensure more information is also better information. Building on existing standards, IATI is agreeing a common format – a common language around aid that means sorting, searching and comparing data are possible. As you say, simply more and more unilateral disclosure wouldn't give us that. But if the donors do fully agree the 2nd and 3rd phases of a common format, this will lay the foundation for harmonisation between donors’ plans, and alignment of donors with the development systems and policy agendas of recipients. The IATI standard needs to be right to achieve this, and that means we all need to engage to get it right: http://www.aidtransparency.net/get-involved
But availability is a problem. It took six months to collect accurate, comprehensive data on all aid in Uganda, and 100% more project aid was found in the process (add ref). A Liberian citizen couldn't get information from a donor about money in their country to solve challenges in that country. This was information they were legally entitled to under the donor's freedom of information act, but no one seemed to know this.
Will IATI solve all the issues around the efficiency, effectiveness, accountability and impact of aid? Clearly not. Will it even get the right information to the right people at the right time? Also not. But it is hard to see how progress can be made on any of these challenges without a common international standard about timely, comprehensive and comparable aid information.
The challenge of making that information useable and then actually using it is also ours. As citizens of aid giving and receiving countries we need to turn transparent aid into accountable aid.
Go to http://publishwhatyoufund.org to find out more about our campaign.
Claudia,
Thanks for your comments, and keep up the good work. Please don't misinterpret my post as a criticism but rather a cautionary tale. I am glad to hear you all are thinking about these issues, and I am sure that we collectively can make some progress if we keep iterating and experimenting. We at GlobalGiving will be launching a number of new initiatives on this front and look forward to sharing what works.
Dennis
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