Advocacy group's aid transparency index shows more openness but room for improvement

"As a major international deadline on foreign assistance transparency draws closer, a new index shows that while donors are becoming more open with their data, still less than half of foreign aid information is openly available," Inter Press Service reports. "'Progress is being met, things are getting better, but that progress is modest,' David Hall-Matthews, the managing director of Publish What You Fund, a global initiative advocating for aid transparency, said in unveiling the organization's Aid Transparency Index 2012 ... in Washington on Monday," the news service writes (10/2). According to the Guardian, the group "ranked 72 organizations and scored each for one of 43 indicators of aid transparency," which "have then been grouped into scores for organizational transparency, their openness in country and in their activities" (Rogers, 10/1).

"Nearly two-thirds of the organizations that Publish What You Fund surveyed both last year and this year showed improvement, with the average score across all donors going up from 34 percent to 41 percent transparency," IPS writes, adding, "For the first time, the index awarded a 'good' score to two organizations, the World Bank and the U.K.'s aid agency, DFID, meaning that they scored at 80 percent or higher." According to IPS, "Others in the top 10 include the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme; the aid agencies of the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden; and the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corporation" (10/2). China and Malta scored at the bottom, the Guardian notes (10/1). "As a supplement to the Index, the U.S. Aid Transparency Report Card [.pdf] explains in more detail how U.S. agencies are doing, what they've committed to improve, and how they should meet those commitments," according to the ONE Blog (Pfeifer, 10/2).