Jeremy Weinstein, Director for Democracy on the National Security Staff and Robynn Sturm, Advisor to the Deputy Director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog about the recently launched www.foreignassistance.gov.

Today the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched Version 1.0 of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, a new platform devoted to making it easier than ever for policymakers, civil society, and the public to understand U.S. investments and their impact around the globe.

Do you want to know how much the U.S. invested in education in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009? The Foreign Assistance Dashboard makes it easy to see and compare investments across sectors and countries at a glance. Civic-minded developers and researchers can download any and all of the Dashboard’s data in a machine-readable format to mash, visualize, and analyze U.S. budget data in new ways.

Today’s launch of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard is but a starting point for greater U.S. aid transparency.  In the months to come, the Dashboard will grow beyond State and USAID to include data from all Federal agencies that provide foreign assistance.  In addition, more granular and timely data will enable users to drill down to the details of specific projects and track trends.  With time, the Dashboard will illuminate not only dollars spent but also the impact of our investments. Ultimately, government-wide collection of featured high-value data will be institutionalized through guidance from the Office of Management and Budget.

The Dashboard will advance U.S. goals for global development and broader prosperity by shining a light on how much foreign assistance is provided, for what purposes, and with what result. Increased transparency will enable recipient governments to better plan and budget. It will enable donors around the globe to coordinate and target investments most effectively. And it will empower civil society worldwide to hold governments and donors accountable for development results.

The Foreign Assistance Dashboard is the latest milestone in the Obama Administration’s commitment to create “an unprecedented level of openness in Government.” President Obama signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government as his first executive action. From publishing the names of visitors to the White House to providing historic visibility into the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, the Administration has already taken unprecedented steps to increase transparency and accountability in government.  In his 2010 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, the President underscored his support for open government principles worldwide, calling on countries in all corners of the globe to make specific commitments that will strengthen the compact between citizens and their leaders.

Please see below for a guest post from Andrew Clarke, Advocacy Manager at Publish What You Fund. Considering the variety of different types of data publications available, IATI is the most effective way to ensure aid data is comparable, useful and transparent. This piece originally appeared on Publish What You Fund’s blog.

Yesterday, the OECD produced an XML file containing DAC members’ annual aid flows. The file is a conversion of 2010 and 2011 data from their Creditor Reporting System (CRS) into XML format (computer-readable “mark-up” language that allows programmers to extract and present data in a comparable and accessible way).

By converting their aid data to XML, the OECD has provided an additional way of accessing this large statistical data set. But this shouldn’t be mistaken for being published to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard.

While XML is the data format specified by IATI, there is a lot more to making this aid data transparent.

IATI was developed because traditional donor reporting (such as the CRS) and ad hoc information on their websites weren’t serving the needs of partner country governments, citizens and other data users. IATI stipulates that in order for data to be transparent, it must be published in a way that is timely, comprehensive, accessible and comparable.

The fundamental requirement for reporting to IATI is that a full picture of each project or activity is provided. All this information, from start to end, is gathered into a single record: this is essential if the information is to be used effectively for the coordination and monitoring of projects on the ground. The CRS XML file makes no attempt to do this.

The IATI standard also provides much more detail, including actual transactions between donors, recipients and contractors. Crucially, the IATI standard requires timely data – published at least quarterly – to create a current picture of aid activities. Partner country governments need timely data so they can plan their own budgets around it.

It is hard to have a debate about the effectiveness of a donor’s aid without detailed and timely information on their spending in a comparable format. Organisations, like us at Publish What You Fund, believe that as more donors continue to publish information to the IATI standard, it will be easier for all stakeholders to hold their institutions and governments to account.

For example, IATI data is already being used in the government’s aid data platform in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This live feed of donor data is used by the government to track spending and plan where to allocate their domestic revenues. The format (XML) is useful but it’s the timeliness and detail of the data that makes this worthwhile – the raison d’être of IATI.

So, what should donors make of this OECD aid data in XML? Don’t equate it with doing IATI. It may be useful for research on historical flows, but it’s aggregated financial reporting (doesn’t show actual transactions) and it is not timely. It also contains none of the added-value components of IATI – such as data on results, conditions and project design.

Donors should press forward with delivering their commitments to aid transparency.

See below for a guest post from Ben Leo, ONE’s global policy director, and Lauren Pfeifer, ONE’s policy associate on the Transparency and Accountability Team.

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On President Obama’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that called for open, transparent government.

The order is based on the principles that openness should be the default position of the US Government, citizens should be given more opportunities to participate in and collaborate with the US Government, and the data the US government collects is a national asset that should be accessible to its citizens.

Photo credit: The White House

That the order was signed on Day 1 was a symbolic gesture, of course, but its impetus was, I believe, the President’s belief that openness and access can generate a level of trust through accountability that no amount of rhetoric and reassurance can replicate. It is a testament to his desire to change the view that our government is a secretive bureaucratic system, one difficult to hold to account.

The President’s commitment to open and accountable government isn’t limited to our own borders. The Obama administration has also taken concrete action to increase the transparency of our foreign assistance, a potentially game-changing step. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave a keynote speech at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, late 2011, in which she announced that the US would sign the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), the global standard of aid transparency. As the largest donor of development assistance, transparent US programs have the potential to be transformative, giving developing nations a more complete picture of their revenue streams.

But plans released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that outline how the US will implement IATI’s aid transparency requirements – which include reporting project data to an open machine-readable database – show the government may be standing in its own way. The plans show a “whole of government” approach which – while beneficial at the political level – doesn’t take into account the factors that affect the ease of implementation. Certain agencies are ready (and more relevant) to begin reporting to IATI, and each of the 10 plus US agencies that currently disburse development assistance have their own systems, and as such, different capacity for converting the data into IATI’s format. Agencies, such as USAID and the MCC, should each have their own plans for how best to report to IATI. This would allow them to be tailored to their various systems and ensure that information is as specific as possible. Useful aid transparency information illuminates projects and transactions at the local level. This project-level information’s specificity is critical. OMB’s plans are lacking in other areas. Geo-coding of data and reporting results are called “supplemental” and left optional. Lastly, the most obvious information is perhaps the least likely to be available. US agencies are only required to publish 1-year forward-looking budget information, rather than the suggested 3 to 5-year forward-looking information that would enable recipient governments to plan ahead.

In order to maintain the momentum that was so inspiring at the start of the President’s first term, his administration should encourage agencies to accelerate the timeline outlined by OMB’s implementation schedule – empowering those who lead our development agencies to publish their agency’s data in IATI format on their websites as soon as they can. This would encourage agencies to be ambitious and speed up implementation, while providing useful data to developing countries.

The principles the President championed the first day of his Presidency are reflected in the reform and evaluation processes undertaken by key US development agencies – new and better data enables citizens to hold their governments to account, and transparency helps to make programs more efficient. But the commitments the US has made to aid transparency are stifled by the approach it has chosen to meet them. US development agencies need to be encouraged to publish what they can, as soon as they can. Perhaps they can take the President’s advice, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” This IATI data is transformative, and will provide a fuller picture to countries who receive sometimes unpredictable assistance from many different countries. The administration should provide clear and strong encouragement to make transparent, as soon we can, the data that has the potential to accelerate progress in the fight against poverty.

Want to know more? Read the US Aid Transparency Report Card.

Partisanship in Washington seems to be at an all-time (and ever escalating) high these days. But when it comes to international development, there is a strong consensus across the ideological spectrum that it is something the U.S. must do and do well. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken important steps toward reforming U.S. development policy and practice. The establishment of the Millennium Challenge Corporation by President Bush, with strong bipartisan support from Congress, paved the way for other important reforms by the Obama Administration including the first-ever Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development and the USAID Forward agenda.

In 2011, MFAN released From Policy to Practice—a set of reform principles to help guide U.S. development policy. The principles include modernizing legislation, incorporating local priorities, and strengthening and empowering USAID. In the two years since the release of From Policy to Practice, we have seen the Obama Administration and Congress make strides and the development community rally behind the importance of reform. But there is still more work to be done, and at a time when budgets are shrinking, finding more effective and efficient approaches to solving development challenges is something everyone can get behind.

Today, the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition released their second Report on Reports, which analyzes over 30 reports, including MFAN’s From Policy to Practice, from across the political spectrum. Despite analyzing a diverse range of work from groups like the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, USGLC finds there’s more of a consensus on U.S. development policy than we might expect. The Report on Reports highlights six key areas of agreement, including ensuring results-driven development, improving coordination, and maintaining sufficient resources, that many groups in the development community are highlighting as priority areas for improving U.S. policy.

The elevation of development alongside diplomacy and defense, the continuing implementation of the USAID Forward agenda, the introduction of legislation like Rep. Gerry Connolly’s (D-VA) Global Partnerships Act and Rep. Ted Poe’s (R-TX) Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act, and President Obama’s proposal to reform U.S. food aid are all positive signs that the reform agenda is making headway. However, the Administration and Congress must work together to institutionalize these important reforms so that progress is not lost as political winds shift in Washington.

Click here to see USGLC’s helpful infographic on the road to a “smart power” approach to national security issues.

July 10, 2013 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs David Beckmann, George Ingram and Jim Kolbe:

MFAN applauds Congressmen Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) for introducing the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (H.R. 2638; S. 1271). An earlier version of the bill received an encouraging response upon its initial introduction during the 112th Congress, where it sailed through the House with a unanimous vote of 390-0.

The bipartisan legislation would strengthen U.S. development programs that are critical levers of influence in an increasingly complex world by directing U.S. agencies involved in foreign assistance to employ more coherent, consistent, and transparent monitoring and evaluation.

This builds on work the Obama Administration has done to embed results-oriented learning practices in U.S. development programming, including new evaluation policies at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State, as well as a new U.S. commitment to participate in the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Specifically, the bills would improve accountability, transparency, and overall effectiveness first by requiring the President to establish uniform interagency guidelines—with measurable goals, performance metrics, and monitoring and evaluation plans—across all U.S. foreign assistance programs. In addition, H.R. 2638 / S.1271 would require the President to maintain and expand the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, a public website with detailed information regarding U.S. foreign assistance on a program-by-program and country-by-country basis. The site, which is currently populated by only five U.S. government departments or agencies, would be updated quarterly by all agencies that administer foreign assistance, and would allow American taxpayers and partner countries the ability to access and track comprehensive, timely, and comparable data.

The Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act is an important step toward making lasting, statutory reforms that will ensure U.S. foreign assistance programs are more transparent, accountable, and effective.  We look forward to working with Members of both the House and Senate to enact this legislation during the 113th Congress.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) today announced the latest addition to the agency’s contribution to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, going live with a new set of over 50,000 financial records. Only USAID is currently reporting transaction data to the Dashboard.

As part of the Obama Administration’s push for greater transparency in foreign assistance within his “Open Government” initiative, the Dashboard was created in order to make accessible data spread across the 20 government agencies involved, in one way or another, with development and humanitarian aid. This past May saw the addition of data from the Department of Treasury and the Department of Defense, on top of information already posted by USAID, the State Department, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. These five agencies comprise about 86 percent of total foreign assistance spending, but a number of other notable departments and agencies have yet to participate—Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and Peace Corps, to name a few. The development community has applauded the steps taken by the Obama Administration in increasing transparency, while continuing to track current progress and push for further additions.

The information that has recently been posted is referred to as “financial transaction data”—data regarding disbursements including vendors, locations, award titles, etc. While all USAID data previously published on the Dashboard is aggregated, the new, disaggregated records contribute greatly to the depth of information available within certain countries and sectors.

The information from the posted records is visualized on the website according to seven criteria (fiscal year, sector, country, title, vendor, obligated, and spent). All records can be searched using four of these criteria (fiscal year, sector, country, and vendor) as well as a search bar that can effectively search for keywords through all the data fields on the record. Each record has 30 fields that can be viewed online or downloaded in XML (a computer-readable format that allows data to be extracted and presented in a comparable and accessible way) or Excel formats, but the Dashboard can only search using the four criteria listed previously. According to USAID, these 30 areas comprise over 90 percent of the data required by the White House executive order OMB Bulletin 12-01 on data accessibility issued across government last fall, and 70 percent of the data required by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), a global aid registry to which the U.S. Government subscribed in 2011 and 160 organizations now publish data.

USAID’s financial records do not yet include food aid data in Food for Peace (Title II, PL 480), and these records will not represent all “open awards” until the fourth quarter of the current fiscal year, or Q4, is closed out. However, a system has been put in place to update these records on a quarterly basis going forward within 45 days of the close of the quarter.

There are also no plans to work backwards and include data from prior years, so the baseline is FY2013.

These records can be accessed through the USAID agency page on the Dashboard by selecting the “Transactions” tab below disaggregated data. The data can then be searched using the seven criteria outlined above. In the resulting records, all 30 fields of information can be viewed by clicking the (+) on the left hand side of the entry and can be downloaded via a button above the listed entries. Note that this data is not searchable under the Dashboard’s interagency search function, only by going through the agency page.

Also appearing today, the Treasury Department has posted data on $23 billion spent on technical assistance in FY2012. The data can be downloaded in IATI format and analysis from the Center for Global Development’s Sarah Jane Stats—an MFAN Principal—can be found here.

See below for excerpts from an op-ed by Albert Kan-Dapaah, co-founder and executive director of Financial Accountability & Transparency-Africa and former Ghanaian minister and parliamentarian. This piece originally appeared in the Hill’s Congress blog.

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“Civil society in recipient countries must fight for accountability and transparency of poverty reducing aid in their respective countries, but we can’t do that without timely and comprehensive data on where U.S. aid dollars are going in their country.”

“Some donor agencies, including USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, do provide much needed information and data.  Unfortunately the publicly available information, in most cases, is not detailed enough nor released in a timely enough manner to be relevant for citizens in Ghana. And for civil society activists, like myself, in order to do our work to ensure foreign aid transparency and accountability, that information is power.  And such information is not always readily available within our own governments—indeed most times we are denied access to such data, making the data released by donors agencies the only information available to us.”

“Informed citizens, both here in the U.S. and in developing countries, can hold their government accountable on how foreign aid funds are spent. Organizing and providing data to meet the needs of civil society activists in their quest to monitor, evaluate and pronounce on the effective use of foreign assistance is key.”

Development leaders from around the globe will gather in Mexico City next week for the first high-level meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. The Global Partnership was established at the Fourth High Level Forum in Busan in 2011 and brings together a wide range of development actors working towards more effective, sustainable, and impactful development results. Today, 161 countries and 54 organizations have endorsed the Global Partnership Principles, including the United States.

Next week’s meeting offers up a chance to evaluate donors’ progress on their commitments to the Principles, including one focused on transparency requiring that donors publish all aid data to a common, open standard by December 2015. The U.S. endorsement of the Global Partnership Principles goes hand in hand with the commitment made by Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), also announced at Busan.

MFAN has joined with many other individuals and organizations in an effort spearheaded by Publish What You Fund to call on USAID Administrator Raj Shah and Secretary of State John Kerry to increase aid transparency efforts ahead of the GPEDC meeting. The supporting individuals and organizations have sent letters to Administrator Shah and Secretary Kerry outlining key recommendations, including:

• Accelerate efforts to publish timely, comprehensive and forward-looking data on all development flows in accordance with IATI and improve the quality of published data;
• Ensure information on development cooperation is compatible and aligned with partner countries’ budgets and systems;
• Support specific actions to improve access, dissemination and use of this data by all stakeholders at country level.

With 2015 just around the corner, the U.S. needs to pick up the pace on publishing timely, comprehensive, and forward-looking data if it is to meet its important commitment to aid transparency. We hope this gathering will provide a much-needed kick-start to that process.

See below for a guest post from Sarah Rose, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Global Development. The piece originally appeared on CGD’s blog on June 23^rd.

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We’re getting closer to knowing how the USG spends its foreign assistance dollars.  Recently, the State Department announced its first release of foreign assistance data on the ForeignAssistance.gov website (also known as “The Dashboard”).  This may not sound terribly glamorous, but it’s actually important news.  Since State’s spending makes up over a third of all US foreign assistance spending, the absence of its data has been a huge gap. With this recent State Department move, spending data for agencies responsible for 96 percent of US foreign assistance are now online. It’s great to see the Dashboard—now in its fourth year—slowly coming together. As it does, here are a few thoughts on why it’s still a good investment, the big challenges it faces, and how it can be improved.

Why We Should Cheer for the Dashboard

If well implemented, the Dashboard, an online resource of US foreign assistance spending (and potentially other) data, can:

• Increase accountability and transparency: One of the Dashboard’s main goals is to enable easier access to information about US foreign assistance investments by US citizens, Congress, other US agencies, along with citizens and governments in recipient countries.
• Ease agencies’ reporting burden (eventually): Behind the Dashboard lies a massive database that will eventually contain all of the underlying information necessary not just to populate the online interface but also to fulfill USG’s other regular reporting, like IATI, the Greenbook, and the OECD-DAC’s Creditor Reporting System.  Once the Dashboard/IATI process is automated within the agencies, complying with all this reporting should become much more streamlined and, importantly, more institutionalized.
• Create incentives for improved data quality: Publishing data can change the dynamic around data quality.  The prospect of increased scrutiny can create an incentive for agencies to reinforce internal systems to produce cleaner, better organized data which can, in turn, bolster an agency’s own understanding of its internal operations.

Why It’s Taking So Long

The Dashboard was announced in 2010.  The effort is led by State’s F Bureau, which coordinates with the (over 20!) USG agencies that deliver some form of foreign assistance, and collects, codes, and publishes their data submissions. Some agencies, however, are far more capable of reporting to the Dashboard than others.  What’s so hard about data reporting, you may ask?  Quite a few things, it turns out, including:

• Existing information systems’ incompatibility with Dashboard requirements.  Different agencies have different financial and project management information systems.  In fact, individual agencies often have multiple, separate systems.  Most of them long predate any notion of “open data” and are simply not designed to compile information in the way the Dashboard needs it.  Changing IT systems is a massive, costly undertaking.
• Foreign assistance funds must be parsed out from a broader portfolio.  For agencies whose core mission isn’t foreign aid, internal systems weren’t set up to differentiate between foreign assistance and domestic spending. This makes it difficult to identify what’s right for the Dashboard and what’s not.  MCC has it easy in this respect (foreign aid only); the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, does not (mostly domestic).

At this point, the Dashboard team over at State is focused principally on providing data (i.e., getting more agencies on board) as well as pushing for improved data quality.  The team is pursuing a phased approach to populating the web portal, publishing agencies’ data as they have it ready.  It’s a courageous move for the USG to publicly release information knowing that it’s incomplete (and highly imperfect). Yet, they recognize that an incremental approach maintains pressure for continued implementation and fosters competition among agencies.  It may also help ease the culture shift towards transparency by gradually demonstrating that openness doesn’t have to be threatening.

Users Beware

This incremental approach also creates risks for users since:

• A user can’t easily tell if data are complete—and often they’re not.  By illustration, this graphicshows agency-by-agency reporting to the Dashboard. You’ll see that not a single year contains information from all agencies (2006 to current), and that most agencies have reporting gaps.  It’s great that the Dashboard is frank about this, but the problem is that this is not clearly indicated where it needs to be.  For instance, if you wanted to find out about aid to Tanzania from 2008 to 2012, you would probably go directly to the Tanzania page and assume that what you pulled for “all agencies” means just that.  You’d be wrong. Only MCC and Treasury have 2008 data on the Dashboard, so “all agencies” means just those two for that year.  More broadly, it’s hard for a user to tell easily if data that don’t show up are absent because they don’t exist (e.g. DOD didn’t spend foreign assistance money in Country X in a given year) or because it’s missing (e.g. DOD did spend foreign assistance money in Country X that year but hasn’t reported it). The Dashboard does include caveats about data limitations but they’re unintuitively scattered in way too many locations that aren’t near where users are looking at data.  So they’re only helpful if a user thinks they should have a question about data quality or comprehensiveness and actively seeks this information.
• Transaction-level data are incomplete (and sometimes unintelligible). Some important fields are missing from most agencies’ submissions.  For example, State is uniformly missing project title and description making it nearly impossible for a user to tell what he or she is looking at.  MCC has titles, but not descriptions.  USAID has descriptions for most of its transactions, but many of these merely replicate the title, are unintuitive to outsiders, refer to supporting documents that are unavailable, and/or cut off mid-description.  Start and end dates are also complicated.  For USDA they’re missing.  USAID provides only the year; MCC provides only the start date. State’s date reporting is spotty and contains apparently inconsistent information, like disbursements that happen before start dates.

Getting the data out there is important, and it’s the right thing to do.  But doing so while simultaneously improving coverage and quality gives me two related (though opposite) concerns.  I’m worried that:

1)      People Will Use the Data and draw incorrect conclusions due to missing or poor quality data; and/or

2)      People Won’t Use the Data because they are aware of its current limitations and will write off the Dashboard as an unreliable source, regardless of whether data coverage and quality improve later.  In a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum, lack of use could in turn slow Dashboard progress, since, to some extent, agencies need to know people will use the data before they invest scarce resources to provide it and improve its quality.

Ideas to Increase the Dashboard’s Potential

State’s Dashboard team and the 20+ agencies with foreign assistance spending are working hard to make the Dashboard a useful, relevant tool.  It’s a big undertaking.  Here are four things I hope they are considering:

1)      Help users better understand the data: The main risks to the Dashboard come from incomplete and thus unreliable data.  Breadth and reliability are key requirements for data to be truly useful. Therefore, the Dashboard should be abundantly clear when users are looking at complete versus partial information, or preliminary versus final data. Users should not have to dig through multiple, separate “additional information” pages to find this out.

2)      Improve transaction data:  Agencies should strive to fill the gaps in their transaction data (especially critical things like titles that facilitate rolling up transactions to the project level), as well as improve the comprehensibility of the information (for example, make descriptions descriptive).

3)      Don’t forget about usability: The current priority of the Dashboard is to publish as much data as possible in manipulable format and let users work with it as they wish.  However, a single user interface is never going to be able to meet the needs of all stakeholders, so the USG should reinforce its efforts to: (i) define who their priority audiences are; and (ii) understand how these different groups want to use the data and tailor the interface accordingly.  The Dashboard team is already taking steps in this direction with outreach to country missions and US-based stakeholders.

4)      Publish agency specific implementation schedules: The Dashboard website does explain where each agency is in the implementation process. But, it should also include agency-by-agency schedules for reporting compliance (and not just with Dashboard requirements, butwith IATI requirements, too).  This would not only provide an accountability structure that would help motivate continued momentum, it would also serve as an important signal of commitment.

See below for a guest post from Ruth Salmon, Research Assistant at Publish What You Fund. Salmon is the lead on data collection for the 2014 Aid Transparency Index. This post originally appeared on Publish What You Fund’s blog on July 7, 2014.

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Data collection continues for the 2014 Aid Transparency Index (ATI). And for the first time, we are sampling documents and data on the results, conditions and sub-national location published to the IATI Registry in XML format.

Sampling essentially means manually checking that the information provided is specific to that activity, has been appropriately tagged using IATI codes, and that it adheres to the ATI indicator guidelines.

The prospect of sampling documents and data for 16 ATI indicators, covering 25+ IATI standard elements, across 27 IATI publishers, was a daunting one. But we knew we had to plough our way through to ensure the information published about aid is relevant and of good enough quality to be used.

Yet this task turned out to be much more fun – and much less arduous – than we feared.

The good examples we found highlighted the potential of IATI data. There were plenty of things to get excited about. We’re happy to note in this first round of sampling that 82% of the 27 IATI publishers sampled passed the sampling checks for the indicators they publish.

The Good

As we clicked through the documents and IATI excerpts randomly selected for us by our sampling tool, there were many examples of good practice:

• Subnational geo-coding: The European Commission’s Foreign Policy Instrument Services, the Netherlands, African Development Bank (AfDB)  and the World Bank are all publishing excellent geo-coded data, enabling us to see the coverage of project activities clearly within each country.
• Results documents and data: Some results information clearly shows whether activities have achieved their intended outputs against stated goals. GAVI, Asian Development Bank (AsDB), Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), World Bank, and DFID have some great results documents, and Global Fund, Sweden and Canada  have some good examples of structured data.
• Appropriate language use: Several organisations (IADB, AfDB, UNDP) are publishing documents and IATI data fields using the language of the recipient country, making it more accessible for in-country users.

The Bad

Some less than helpful trends emerged too…

• Over tagging: Some organisations are linking many documents to a single IATI category code, even when the code isn’t relevant to that document. This effectively renders the use of codes meaningless, making it very difficult to find the information you seek.
• Inaccessible data: On a few occasions we were unable to access documents because of broken links. The use of scanned PDFs also makes the data difficult to parse and scrape. Document links led to generic web pages, with no clues on how to find documents for specific activities. Some samples were difficult to understand due to the acronyms and shorthand used to describe information.
• Incoherence within data: Occasionally the codes used in the IATI data didn’t match the documents tagged. For example, country strategies tagged as organization strategies. There are several cases where the data specifies that no conditions are attached but conditions documents, with clear conditions outlined, are tagged!

The Ugly

Finally, a tiny percentage the IATI data we sampled was incomprehensible. Activities had no titles or descriptions, and were just lists of unlabelled transactions. This makes the information fairly useless to pretty much everyone. Queue many unrepeatable mutterings, long sighs and exasperated researchers.

The reality hit that it’s not possible to truly celebrate IATI publication until it is done well. Done badly, it serves very little use at all.

In summary…

Sampling has showed us the potential of using XML for publishing aid data for a wide variety of organisations. The elements of the IATI code had been used in many different ways, depending on what fits best with organisation’s particular structure and activities. When accurate and well-coded, it became clear that IATI data makes it easy to compare aid spending across time, space and many organisation types.

But it has also shown that unless the IATI standard is adhered to, the information published runs the risk of being difficult to understand, difficult to access, and difficult to reuse. Although it’s our impression that the majority of the errors we found were unintentional, it’s important that they are fixed to deliver on the full potential of IATI – of comprehensive, comparable aid data.

Now with data collection complete for 2014, we’re busy finalising and analysing the dataset so we can see this year’s results. Watch this space!

See below for a guest post from Catalina Reyes, Senior Advocacy Associate at Publish What You Fund.

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When the U.S. made its first foray into the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), it adopted a “whole of government” approach. While there is merit to having various agencies of government speaking with one voice, this also creates problems when it comes to publishing quality data.

We were very encouraged when the U.S. changed course on this and adopted the IATI standard, with a tailored U.S. extension. This is consistent with other donors’ practices and means we’re now all reading from the same page – or at least from the same list of fields.

It might seem like a technical detail, but the U.S. extension is a big step forward, and we want to congratulate the government for using IATI as a basis for agencies’ publication to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard.

MCC has already used this new extension to publish to the Dashboard, and we can confirm the data output is identical to the data input. Since the IATI standard is the only globally agreed standard for publishing aid information, it makes sense to use this when requesting information from donor agencies.

Of course, while this is a big step forward, our work is not yet done. Call me a perfectionist, but  I think U.S. data should be among the most detailed and useful of all major donors.

As the Dashboard and the various U.S. agencies continue to work on their commitments made at Busan, our key recommendations for improvements are:

Collect better data. Encourage agencies to input high quality information from the beginning of the project cycle. We know we can’t go back five years ago but USG should inform missions and staff working on information gathering about the changes happening in HQ.

Don’t lump all the data together.Segment aid data by agency, rather than aggregating into a single file per country. This will help to protect the quality of each agency’s data and preserve its integrity. If one agency improves orbreaks its data, it’s clear where the problem lies, and it doesn’t affect other agencies. This is important in encouraging frequent and steady improvements in the data over time.

Smooth the publication process. Automate publication directly to IATI, instead of relying on a manual transfer of data from agencies to foreignassistance.gov. The Dashboard and IATI are now using the same information fields. This means that the Dashboard can consume IATI data. And it should.

Automate generation of IATI data by agencies. Agencies should generate their IATI XML information from their own systems. This should be the goal and encouraged by the Dashboard. This should be a priority for State, USAID and MCC; others such as HHS, USDA and Treasury should then follow suit. We have some specific agency recommendations:

• USAID should follow MCC’s lead and make sure data generation is as close to systems as possible, thereby likely resulting in higher data quality, bringing skills in-house and making the process sustainable and automated in the medium term. The aim should be to get the basic data right first, and then quickly move on to incorporating the sub-national geo-coding and project documents that are available elsewhere on USAID’s websites.
• State needs to bring data generation closer to the Department’s own systems and make these able to speak to each other. This means that the data should come straight from the systems and undergo minimal or no manipulation. In doing this State should prioritize basic information such as project titles and dates for remaining projects that don’t have them.
• PEPFAR should identify its activities as OGAC activities and not just State activities (e.g., identify that it’s OGAC within State Department), as they have different purposes and objectives, and should be a key champion of traceability down the chain of implementers.

There are positive changes happening within U.S. agencies and within the Dashboard and we think the adoption of the IATI standard is an important one. However, more is needed to achieve the Busan deadline of 2015. And the emphasis has to be on the quality of aid information if it is to be really useable by donors, partner countries and other users.

Our 2014 Aid Transparency Index is out soon, with more details about progress in the U.S. and globally. Stay tuned!

Please see below for a guest post from MFAN’s Accountability Working Group Co-Chairs, Diana Ohlbaum and Lori Rowley. Ohlbaum is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Rowley is the Director for Global Food Security and Aid Effectiveness at The Lugar Center.

***

For those of us who seek to improve development effectiveness, the rationale for transparency over foreign assistance spending is obvious.  Knowing what is spent, where and how it is used, and what is achieved is essential for ensuring that governments deliver on their promises – both here in the United States and in developing countries.  Quality data that is timely, comprehensive, accessible and usable is the currency of democratic accountability.

But for those who produce and collect the data, releasing it does not always seem to carry significant benefits.  If knowledge is power, then insider knowledge is concentrated power, and the rewards for sharing it may be less apparent.

To clarify the advantages of transparency for those who are not already convinced of its value, MFAN’s Accountability Working Group has produced a one-pager that explains the key reasons why transparency is important:

• It improves coordination among U.S. agencies and international donors.
• It enables partner governments to plan effectively.
• It reduces administrative burdens and helps meet reporting requirements.
• It builds stronger, more resilient, and more capable states.
• It harnesses information that can be used to improve policies, services, and outcomes.

These are just a few of the many reasons why releasing data to the public, and making it as reliable and useful as possible, serves our larger foreign policy and development goals.  But those goals can only be met if those of us in civil society actually use the data to inform our programs, our analysis, and our advocacy.  Thus we offer these recommendations for the larger development community:

1) EXPLORE.  Set aside time to go to www.foreignassistance.gov and www.iatiregistry.org.  Prepare some questions that you’d like to have answered and see what you can find out.

2) SHARE.  It’s shocking how many people and organizations that could benefit from this information don’t even know it exists, here in Washington as well as across the United States and around the world.  Do your part by spreading the word.

3) TRAIN.  For researchers and advocates in the United States and developing countries alike, demonstrations and trainings can be very empowering and can overcome initial anxiety and intimidation about using new tools and technology.

4) PUSH.  Don’t just let the data reside on the internet as a passive resource.  Take the time to extract useful information and analyze, reframe, and repackage it to meet the needs of specific stakeholder communities.  Distribute it in formats that are widely accessible.

5) CREDIT.  Publicly cite the Dashboard and IATI when you use their data for blog posts, articles, research reports, and media stories.  Those who toil at collecting, reviewing and disseminating the data need to know that their hard work has not been in vain.

6) RESPOND.  The Dashboard team at the Department of State openly solicits feedback on the quality, format, and content of the data.  Let them know what works well and what doesn’t at http://www.foreignassistance.gov/web/Contact.aspx.

Please see below for a guest post from MFAN’s Accountability Working Group Co-Chairs, Diana Ohlbaum and Lori Rowley. Ohlbaum is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Rowley is the Director for Global Food Security and Aid Effectiveness at The Lugar Center.

***

The first great boon for transparency of U.S. foreign assistance came in December 2010 with the launch of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, a visual presentation of budget and appropriations data that previously had been difficult for outsiders to obtain.  Created by the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance Resources (F), the Dashboard aimed to bring together information from all 22 U.S. government agencies carrying out foreign aid programs.  Its main purpose was to be a resource for Congress and the American public.

The second great boon for aid transparency came about a year later, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared U.S. backing for the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which publishes standardized and comparable data from public and private donors as well as developing country stakeholders.  Because the IATI Registry is far more comprehensive than the Dashboard, it promises to be a more useful resource for developing countries themselves.

But there was a hitch: the Dashboard and IATI were using different formats and collecting different fields of information.  The State Department, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and other U.S. agencies were burdened by either having to produce the information twice, in two different schemas, or else by having to translate data from one schema to the other.  As a result, there were bottlenecks and delays, and reported information often was stripped of important details in the process.

In light of this mismatch, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network’s (MFAN) Accountability Working Group decided that one of its top priorities for 2014 would be to ensure that foreign assistance data is published fully, without delay and without compromises to quality, to the IATI Registry.  Rather than duplicating the data, we argued that it made sense for U.S. agencies to adopt the IATI standard – along with a special extension for details that are unique to the U.S. government – and to use that as the basis for the Dashboard.  This would allow agencies to produce one set of data that could be easily adapted for both purposes.

Led by one of our partners, Publish What You Fund, the Working Group met several times over the spring and summer with the Dashboard team to convey our concerns and recommend solutions.  Publish What You Fund, which ranks the transparency of all major donors in its annual Aid Transparency Index, provided sustained technical assistance to the State Department to help it make the conversion in a timely and efficient way.  With a deadline approaching for collection of information for their 2014 Aid Transparency Index – due to be released on October 8th – the Dashboard made an all-out bid to fix the problem.

So we are pleased to announce that these efforts have all paid off: the Dashboard has adopted the IATI standard with a U.S. extension.  This has eliminated some of the data quality issues and will help to streamline the process for data being published to the IATI Registry.  Let’s give credit where it’s due: to the Dashboard team at the State Department for recognizing and successfully addressing this problem, and to Publish What You Fund for midwifing a solution.

Although this particular MFAN benchmark has been met, it’s only a small part of a much broader transparency agenda.  There are still serious problems with data quality and missing data, and we are calling on the State Department to develop and publicly release a management plan that explains how it will meet its obligations for full IATI implementation by the end of 2015.   USAID in its 2014 Open Government Plan has pledged to “investigate the costs of fulfilling additional IATI reporting requirements and publish a cost management plan which elaborates the findings,” which we applaud, and we urge the State Department to do the same.  Both plans are needed on an urgent basis if adequate funding is to be identified and technology upgrades are to be made by the promised deadline.  In the end, the higher the quality of the data, the more useful a tool it becomes for strengthening the effectiveness of foreign assistance.

See below for a post by MFAN Co-Chairs George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, and Connie Veillette.

***

We at MFAN have been eagerly anticipating the beginning of October. Not just because of playoff baseball and the possibility of a Beltway Series, but because with the beginning of October we get the release of Publish What You Fund’s latest Aid Transparency Index (ATI), a comprehensive ranking of international donors’ commitment to transparency.

Earlier this year MFAN released a refreshed policy agenda where we prioritized accountability through transparency, evaluation and learning as a powerful pillar of aid reform. More recently, we put together a two-pager that details why transparency is so important to ensuring that U.S. foreign assistance has maximum impact. When it comes to transparency, we believe that high-quality, accessible, timely, and usable data on how aid dollars are being spent can drive accountability – both in the U.S. and in partner countries.

The U.S. government has made notable progress in recent years to demonstrate its commitment to transparency. In 2010, the Foreign Assistance Dashboard was launched as a way to present budget and appropriations data on agencies doing foreign assistance. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the U.S. was committed to fully implementing the International Aid Transparency Initiative by the end of 2015.

With the release of Wednesday’s ranking, we will be looking closely at where the evaluated U.S. agencies fall. Will the Millennium Challenge Corporation keep the top spot? Will PEPFAR (ranked Very Poor in 2013) and the State Department and Department of Defense (both ranked Poor) have made any significant improvements?

There is reason to be hopeful. This year, PEPFAR, the State Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services started to publish data to the Dashboard. USAID is in the process of conducting a pilot study on how aid data is being used in three partner countries in order to better inform their own thinking on transparency. And the Dashboard recently moved to publish data to the common XML IATI standard, making U.S. aid data easier to use and of better quality; and last week began to roll out a newly redesigned and more user-friendly website. But a lot of data is still missing and the U.S. still has much work to do before meeting its IATI commitment a little over a year from now.

As die-hard fans of transparency, we look forward to digging into the results on Wednesday; and to seeing whether the high-level commitments the U.S. has made to transparency are making it a real contender on the global stage.

See below for a guest post from Laia Grino, Senior Manager for Transparency, Accountability and Results at InterAction. This post originally appeared on InterAction’s blog on October 7^th.

***

This morning, Publish What You Fund (PWYF) will launch its 2014 Aid Transparency Index, which ranks donors according to the amount – and quality – of the aid information they publish. As a partner, we know that every year the Index prompts a mad rush around the deadline for data collection, as donors seek to improve their scores. This race to the top is exactly what PWYF aims to accomplish, and through this the Index has proven to be a very effective tool.

Yet the impact of the Index goes beyond just the ranked donors. It’s also an occasion for the broader transparency community to reflect on where we are. At InterAction, we’ve been thinking about our own transparency and believe this is the right moment to announce that we are taking an important step forward. I am happy to say that we have adopted an open information policy, and in line with that commitment, intend to publish information on our work according to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard.

Our open information policy is an expression of InterAction’s commitment to transparency and openness, and is meant to guide the way in which InterAction shares information. In it, we lay out five principles that underpin our approach to transparency:

• Disclose information proactively
• Assume a presumption in favor of openness
• Provide information in accessible formats
• Make it easy to find information
• Adhere to high data quality standards

Recognizing that there are times when full transparency may be dangerous or counterproductive, the policy also describes the criteria we will use to determine when not to share information.

Why has InterAction chosen to go down this route?

First, we believe that it is important to practice what you preach. For several years now, InterAction has been advocating for greater U.S. government transparency. We have also worked to improve the transparency of our own community, through initiatives like NGO Aid Map. Showing that we’re willing to take the same step is important for maintaining our credibility with our members, donors and partners. Moreover, in 2010 InterAction played a key role in developing the Istanbul Principles for CSO Development Effectiveness, in which civil society organizations (CSOs) committed to being transparent and accountable. By adopting this policy, we are living up to this commitment and demonstrating that we take our commitments as seriously as we expect donors to take theirs.

Second, we feel an open information policy is just good practice. It is not enough to just say you will be transparent – formally expressing that commitment allows people to understand your approach and also gives them a way of holding you accountable.

Finally, we think it’s the smart thing to do. While people often worry about the costs of transparency, we believe that in the long-run, sharing information proactively will save us time. Rather than having to prepare tailored responses to each individual information request, in many cases we will be able to point people to our website to find the information we have available. Like others before us, I expect that the process of becoming more open will also help us improve our internal information management practices, making us more effective as an organization.

As several experts noted in our “Why Transparency Matters” blog series, transparency is a process. It starts with a commitment, but requires ongoing attention and effort. You are never “done” being transparent. In the weeks and months to come, we will be taking both big and small steps to improve our transparency. Making the data already on our website –such as that in our Member Directory – more accessible by making it exportable is a small step (and one we’ve already taken). Publishing to IATI is a big step, and will take some time to do right. We look forward to walking down this path.

See below for a guest post from Sarah Lucas, Program Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This piece originally appeared on the Hewlett Foundation’s blog on October 16.

***

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) won the race to the top in 2014. But if the past few years are any indication, it won’t hold onto the top spot for long. Last year the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation took top honors, and in 2012 it was the UK Department for International Development. The fact that the race is on—for increased transparency in foreign assistance—is a huge tribute to Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Index (ATI). The Index, in its fourth year of publication, ranks an ever-growing number of global donors (currently 68) on how transparent their spending is.

Last week’s launch of the 2014 ATI at the Center for Global Development in Washington DC offered four very different leaders in transparency a chance to talk about how ATI is inspiring agencies to action, and why that matters—one each from a multilateral donor, a bilateral donor, a civil society network, and a ministry of finance.

Ranking tenth in 2012, and forth in 2013, UNDP crept their way up to #1 on the Index in 2014. They took the long-view, built the necessary systems, and in the words of Haoliang Xu, United Nations Assistant Secretary General and UNDP Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific, they made a deliberate decision to change their culture and mindset toward openness—not just at headquarters, but across their 140 country offices.

If UNDP ran a marathon to the top spot, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) ran a sprint. PEPFAR ranks only 30th on the 2014 Index, so why the hype? Well, just last year they were number 50. PEPFAR is a clear case of what you can achieve if you have a real champion for open data in the drivers’ seat. Ambassador Deborah Birx, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and head of PEPFAR, is just that. With three decades working in HIV/AIDS immunology, vaccine research, and global health, she came into office with a clear-eyed and heartfelt interest in data. She started at PEPFAR in April 2014, just three months before the cut-off for data collection for the 2014 ATI. After the launch event, a representative of Publish What you Fund mentioned that Birx has asked them what she could do to improve on the Index. No one believed she could move the needle in 2014 because she had so little time. But in the course of just a few weeks, she took the program up 20 spots. Proof positive that political will is more important than the technical or administrative complications of opening the books.

As interesting as the horserace is, it is not nearly as interesting as why UNDP and PEPFAR made these moves. Why do these agencies want to be in the race at all?

The most common “whys” behind aid transparency center on two principles:

Facilitate accountability—If citizens (in both donor and recipient countries) have more information about aid flows, they can better hold their governments accountable for using it well. Dalitso Kubalasa, Executive Director of the Malawi Economic Justice Network, made this case clearly at the launch event. For years he and his colleagues have literally had to knock on the doors of donors and their own government to eke out data about who is spending what in his country. That’s definitely one way to slow him down in holding his government accountable!

Improve planning—How can country governments, and their donor partners, plan interventions and allocate resources if they don’t have a clear picture of what others are doing? How do you know whether to allocate your scarce education resources to teacher training, building classrooms, or school feeding programs if you don’t know who is doing what in the sector?

These reasons are compelling enough. But Birx and Xu took it a big step further. At the launch, they told us why increased transparency matters for their ability to get their jobs done. Together, they argued that more transparency helps them:

Build a base of support—Xu noted that UNDP relies on voluntary contributions and being transparent about what they do makes it easier to attract support. Birx pointed out that in the face of so many domestic priorities, the American people deserve to know how aid dollars are being spent. She also argued that only with hard data can you make the case that we are not “done” with HIV/AIDS even though global advocates have partly moved on to other things.

Promote innovation and learn from failure—Subject yourself to scrutiny, Xu argued, and you’ll learn how to improve. “There is a lot of self-interest in this,” he said. And while most data agencies don’t yet release much data on program results (focusing first on the more universally comparable financial data), Publish What You Fund hopes they will in the future. Birx is on board with that. “Negative results would be great,” she said, because they give you a chance to build on lessons, do better in the future and help others avoid your mistakes.

These additional “whys”—as compelling as they are—are inwardly-focused. All of the speakers, including keynote Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance from Nigeria, encouraged us to dream even bigger. The future vision for aid transparency includes being able to:

Spend more time doing good work, and less time tracking down the dollars—Several audience members rightfully asked, who is actually using aid data in developing countries? I’llnever forget meeting the poor guy in Malawi charged with tracking and coordinating across donor-funded health programs. Tucked away in a basement office in the Ministry of Health, he had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stacked with binders, each labeled for a different donor—PEPFAR, Global Fund, JICA, UNDP, USAID, SIDA, AFDB, DFID, and on and on. Imagine if instead of riffling through all these binders to answer the question, “how much are donors spending on malaria prevention and treatment in Malawi?” he could go to a one-stop-shop for data online? That vision is why the ATI not only measures if agencies make their data public, but also whether they report it to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)’s Registry.

Set a high bar for developing governments too—Both Minister Okonjo-Iweala and Kubalasa were passionate on this point. Aid is only one piece of the puzzle, and for some, at least, an increasingly small one. There is a collective responsibility for development outcomes and transparency of financial flows. By getting their own houses in order, donors set an example for partner countries to publish their budgets as well. Minister Okonjo-Iweala said, almost to herself, “I haven’t published all the aid we have received . . . maybe I should do that. It would be a good complement to publishing our own budget.” She then added more firmly, “We are moving, but haven’t reached Nirvana yet!”

Better target resources to needs—Birx got practically giddy when she described what’s next for PEPFAR: site-level data (think villages or communities). She said all partner organizations funded by PEPFAR in 2014 had to agree to produce site-level data. Why is Birx pushing for this? If you look at average values for resources or results across all program sites, you won’t know which are under/over resourced relative to need. But if you can triangulate site-level data—for example, on resource flows, rates of counseling and testing services, results in prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and HIV positivity levels, you could seriously tailor your interventions, use your more money more wisely, and save more lives.

Attract creative minds to solve complex problems—In another call for multi-dimensional analysis, Birx expressed frustration at not being able to bring together economic, demographic, health, and financial data to really understand complex development problems and the resources dedicated to solving them. However, there are surely data-savvy, service-minded people who can do this. The key, she argued, is to make databases “appealing and discernable” enough to attract attention. It’s not enough to put gobs of data on a website. People need help navigating the data and understanding why they’re important. That’s why the ATI measures not only availability of data, but its accessibility too. Six of the seven top performers in 2014 have open data portals that promote access to and use of their data. For example, check out portals for DFID, Sweden,UNDP, MCC and the World Bank.

These speakers made a compelling case for why aid transparency matters, and why they will continue to push their own agencies to improve. With all this motivation, let’s hope we see even more donors jockeying to move up the Index in 2015.

See below for a guest post from Sally Paxton, U.S. Representative for Publish What You Fund and member of MFAN’s Accountability Working Group, on USAID’s recently released IATI Cost Management Plan. This piece originally appeared on PWYF’s blog on Monday, July 6.

***

On July 1^st, Publish What You Fund released its 2015 U.S. Aid Transparency Review, which assesses the progress of six U.S. donors on their efforts to publish high quality aid information.  The Busan deadline – December 2015 – is when the U.S. has committed to fully implementing the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).  And important commitments are at stake in the Financing for Development conference in mid-July in Addis Ababa.  So at Publish What You Fund, we thought a mid-year progress report would be an important undertaking to see where these U.S. agencies are and what needs to be done in the next six months.

The Review found that the progress of the various agencies was mixed – only two of the four are “on track” to meet the 2015 deadline.  For a number of years, USAID has lagged in its performance of our Annual Transparency Index, coming in at the bottom of the “Fair” category in both 2013 and 2014.

But USAID is turning an important corner.  In our 2015 Review, it was the biggest improver, jumping 22 points from its 2014 score to reach the “good” category for the first time.  Behind this improvement was the effort of a small cross-cutting working group.  Consistent with USAID’s Open Government Plancommitment to undertake both an analysis of its IATI capabilities and what it would take – both in terms of resources and steps – this working group produced a four-phase cost management plan.

On June 4^th, the Acting Administrator approved three out of the four phases of the plan.  Additionally, the intent is to have IATI folded into its Development Information System, so that it is integrated with its other information platforms, thus obviating the need for Phase IV.  And on July 1^st, USAID made its International Aid Transparency Initiative Cost Management plan public.

Kudos!

One might sensibly ask why what seems like such a bureaucratic exercise is important?  There are a few reasons – which cover both the content and the way in which USAID is conducting its efforts to achieve robust publication of its aid information:

• In order to implement the IATI standard, agencies need to identify what it publishes, where the gaps are, and what it will take to be fully compliant, both in terms of resources and processes. The working group approached this in a pragmatic way. In fact, phase I (which were internal steps that could be taken without resource implications) was completed in April – before the approval of phrases II and III. This thorough internal review will help to ensure efforts are sustainable and long lasting.
• The working group consulted with the stakeholder community on its initial plan – prior to agency approval. This informal outreach underscored the agency’s commitment to practice
• This same practice of consulting prior to a final report was also done in connection with USAID’s Aid Transparency Pilot Assessment, where two consultations were held – again, prior to reaching the final conclusions.

The plan isn’t perfect.  The published cost management plan, for example, is very light on the “cost” part.  And publishing a plan doesn’t guarantee success.  But it is very hard to deliver without a vision on how to get to the finish line. Top USAID leadership will need to give the working group’s plan its continued support so that implementation moves forward on time and on budget.

But this is a really positive step.  So congratulations to USAID.  We look forward to your continued forward progress on the road to aid transparency.

October 2, 2015

Ms. Mary Beth Goodman
Senior Director
National Security Council
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Ms. Goodman:

We at the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network appreciate the open and consultative process led by the White House to gather recommendations for the third Open Government Partnership (OGP) U.S. National Action Plan.  Your leadership has been instrumental in the formation and implementation of the previous two OGP National Action Plans, and we welcome the opportunity to help build on those gains with strong new commitments in the next plan.

We applaud the OGP Steering Committee, of which the U.S. is a part, for its recent adoption of the “Joint Declaration on Open Government for the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”  We strongly support the integration of the SDGs into the U.S Government OGP National Action Plan and vice versa — leveraging the OGP plans, platform and principles for the achievement not only of Goal 16, but the entire SDG 2030 agenda.

The inclusion of commitments to improve the transparency of U.S. foreign assistance in the previous two plans has helped motivate the progress agencies have made over the past four years.  However, much work remains to be done. In order to fully deliver on prior commitments, a robust new commitment to improving data quality and data use is needed.

We propose that the U.S. government make the following new commitments in the area of foreign assistance transparency.

1.All U.S. agencies administering foreign assistance will publish data at the activity level and on a quarterly basis, in line with the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). By 2017, the data published will represent 100% of U.S. official development assistance (ODA).

This commitment represents full implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which the U.S. joined in 2011. The 100% figure comes from the implementation schedule presented in December 2012 by the State Department and USAID on behalf of the U.S. Government.[1] Though the previous two National Action Plans called for all agencies administering foreign assistance to publish their aid data to ForeignAssistance.gov and in line with the international standards, only some data has been published and the quality of the data is generally low.[2]

In order to meet this commitment, each U.S. agency administering foreign assistance should publish a cost management plan that assesses how the agency will collect and publish aid data, what resources the agency will need, and the source of those resources. The U.S. government’s commitment to IATI will only be achieved when responsible agencies have clear plans that identify how they will collect and publish the data. Agency-specific plans should be developed by December 2016 to allow at least one year for implementation. USAID’s publication of such a plan this year demonstrates that this commitment is feasible.[3]

2.The U.S. government will encourage the use of the data it publishes by domestic and international stakeholders. It will develop capacity-building programs within U.S. agencies and with domestic and international stakeholders so the data can be accessed and used for different purposes.

The potential of open data to have a transformative impact on development will not be realized unless the data is used.  Capacity training programs should be developed in the first quarter of 2016 and should continue for the duration of the plan.  During the course of the third National Action Plan, the U.S. government must build on the progress made in opening data by encouraging its uptake and use.  This requires identifying and responding to demand for the data by multiple stakeholders.

The interagency team led by the State Department and USAID responsible for ForeignAssistance.gov has made some progress over the last two National Action Plans in understanding the information needs of domestic stakeholders like Congress, the academic community, and the public.  Going forward, the attention to data use must expand to include more partner country perspectives.

Partner country governments have a critical need for foreign aid information. Aligning this information with country budget classifications, for example by implementing the IATI budget identifier, will help users bridge the gap between the aid and the domestic budget. It is this more complete picture that can lead to better decision making.  A recent USAID study found that, despite increases in the quantity of data published, the local communities that U.S. foreign assistance serves rarely access or use the data to monitor and give feedback on the development activities of donors and their own governments.[4]  To remedy this, the U.S. should implement capacity building programs within foreign assistance agencies to work with local media and civil society partners as “infomediaries” on innovative ways to effectively communicate U.S. foreign assistance information to local audiences.

We appreciate the effort and attention that will be necessary to realize these commitments, and we look forward to providing assistance and public support to help translate these commitments into outcomes during the course of the third U.S. National Action Plan.

Thank you for your consideration and your leadership in using the Open Government Partnership as a global platform to set a high standard of open and responsive government.  We look forward to your response and continued dialogue.

Sincerely,

George Ingram, The Brookings Institution & MFAN Co-Chair

Diana Ohlbaum, Independent Consultant & MFAN Accountability Working Group Co-Chair

Lori Rowley, The Lugar Center & MFAN Accountability Working Group Co-Chair

Didier Trinh, MFAN Executive Director

InterAction

ONE

Oxfam America

Publish What You Fund

Save the Children

[1] IATI Implementation schedule. http://publishwhatyoufund.org/files/IATI-Implementation-Schedule_Final_USA.xlsx

[2] 2015 U.S. Aid Transparency Review. http://roadto2015.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2015-US-Aid-Transparency-Review.pdf

[3] USAID International Aid Transparency Initiative Cost Management Plan, July 2015.  See https://www.usaid.gov/documents/1870/usaid-iati-cost-management-plan

[4] https://www.usaid.gov/transparency/country-pilot-assessment

October 20, 2015 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, and Connie Veillette

MFAN welcomes the introduction of the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2015 by Representatives Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). This bipartisan legislation would codify important reforms to ensure that U.S. agencies involved in foreign assistance are focused on rigorous and consistent monitoring and evaluation of programs and on making comprehensive, timely, and comparable aid data publicly available. By strengthening its commitment to monitoring and evaluation and transparency, the U.S. government can better allocate aid resources and be held accountable by a range of stakeholders.

Earlier versions of this legislation have been unanimously approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 113^th Congress and by the House of Representatives in the 112^th Congress. We commend Representatives Poe and Connolly and Senators Rubio and Cardin for their continued leadership to enact this important legislation.

MFAN strongly supports this legislation. It is vital to guaranteeing that U.S. foreign assistance becomes as transparent as possible and programs are thoroughly evaluated. Enacting this bill will help pave the way for the U.S. Government to further embed aid effectiveness principles in its development policy and practice in order to get the most out of every dollar we spend. The positive actions we have seen this Administration take to improve the accountability of U.S. foreign assistance, such as creating ForeignAssistance.gov as a public venue for aid data, and the USAID and State Department evaluation policies, will be strengthened by this legislation.

We look forward to working with Congress to make this legislation even stronger by requiring that aid effectiveness approaches be rigorously applied to all foreign assistance, including security assistance, and reinforcing existing U.S. government commitments to transparency and evaluation, such as meeting its obligation on the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

November 5, 2015 (WASHINGTON) – This statement is delivered on behalf of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) by Co-Chairs George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, and Connie Veillette

Today the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2015 (H.R. 3766), recently introduced by Representatives Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA). MFAN thanks Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) and Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-NY) for swiftly taking up this legislation for consideration, and the bill sponsors for their continued leadership on efforts to make foreign assistance more transparent and accountable.

MFAN strongly supports this bipartisan legislation, which would codify important reforms to ensure that U.S. agencies involved in foreign assistance are focused on rigorous and consistent monitoring and evaluation of programs and on making comprehensive, timely, and comparable aid data publicly available. By reinforcing its existing commitments to transparency and evaluation through legislation, the U.S. government can better track, measure, and allocate scarce aid resources.

We hope to see swift passage of this important legislation by the full House of Representatives. We also urge the Senate to take similar action on the companion bill (S. 2184), introduced by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD).