Better Information: Better Aid

aidinfo is an initiative to accelerate poverty reduction by making aid more transparent. According to this 24-page consultation draft by the creators of aidinfo, Development Initiatives Poverty Research, United Kingdom, "transparency of aid is a means to an end: it improves people’s lives by enabling them to make sure that aid is used better. It reduces poverty because it improves decision-making, increases accountability and ownership, reduces duplication and waste, and so increases the impact of aid."

Their preliminary findings are:

• "Improved transparency of aid information would accelerate poverty reduction by making aid more effective and accountable...
  
• Users of aid information want more accessible, more detailed, more up-to-date, more consistent information that they can translate into local formats and definitions; they want to be able to trace money from the funder to the intended beneficiaries; and they want more reliable information about future aid flows.
  
• Donors generally support greater transparency of aid information. They already publish a lot of the information needed, but there is presently no way to organise it in ways that make it easy to use, and the reporting burdens are growing.
  
• There would be substantial benefits from defining and implementing common definitions and a common format for reporting aid information to be implemented by all donors....There are no significant political or technical barriers to this, nor would it be very expensive: what is needed is coordination among donors.
  
• With greater political commitment to transparency donors could make aid information available in the detailed and accessible formats required...."

The document recognises the need for local reporting solutions, grounded in the specific needs of particular countries, but recommends that donors and partner governments should look for ways to act globally to create a platform that supports and simplifies the creation and maintenance of local aid data applications that are responsive to local needs. "[W]e are suggesting that the donors should agree to extend the existing common definitions and formats that already exist, and each to set up a system that translates their own internal data into those classifications and formats. This data in a common format would then be a single reporting channel for each donor, which would be available online for the many users of data to access in the way they need.  "The paper also sets out some specific steps that can be taken in the short term to improve aid reporting. It focuses on the already existing Development Co-operation Directorate Development Assistance Committee (DCD-DAC), which is the principal body through which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) deals with issues related to co-operation with developing countries.

The paper suggests:

• "All DAC donors currently report some information about individual projects to the DAC Creditor Report System (CRS) and this is the current standard for access to aid information. However, this process is far from perfect.
  
• It would be immensely helpful to have more complete reporting of the long descriptions to the CRS system from all bilateral and multilateral donors, inclusion of geographical locations or other geo spatial data as a matter of course, and contact information or links to donor project documents.
  
• Some donors complete the ‘Implementing Channel of Delivery’ field in detail, giving the name of the government department, non-governmental organisation (NGO), or research institution. This information is a vital first step for tracking how aid is used.
  
• Some donors are able to make this [CRS] information available much more quickly [than the verification period allows]. Provided that users are aware of the limitations of the data – notably the lack of verification – it would be useful to them to have access to the information as soon as it is has been made available.
  
• Both bilateral and multilateral donors could... give this [DAC reporting to CRS] higher priority, and allocate more resources to enable the agencies to comply in full with the directives for CRS reporting."