Progress on UK Aid Transparency Guarantee

Commitment: We will publish detailed information about all new DFID projects and programmes on our website, in a common standard with other donors.

We now publish financial information and project documents on our website for all new DFID projects over £500. This includes Business Cases (showing why we have chosen a particular project or programme, what we will do, how much it will cost and what the expected results are) and project reviews (so that people can see what has actually been achieved).

We also publish all individual financial transactions over £500, new contracts , and new tender documents for contracts over £10,000. Information is published both on DFID’s website in the projects database and to the common International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard on the IATI website (iatiregistry.org).

The UK was the first bilateral donor to publish to IATI standards, allowing users to freely convert our information into databases, spreadsheets or other formats to help illustrate and assess performance. Now organisations responsible for 75% of global Official Development Assistance have signed up to this common IATI standard. We have gone beyond the ATG commitment by also publishing our:

• Business Plan, setting out our vision and priorities to 2015, as well as actions and milestones along the way, and indicators to track performance

• Operational Plans (including country plans), detailing how we will implement the Business Plan and deliver the results to which we have committed

• Results Framework , to monitor progress against key development outcomes and results, and to monitor our own performance While we aim to publish information in as much detail as possible, a small number of exclusions apply, for example for security or commercial reasons.

Commitment: Information published will be comprehensive, accessible, comparable, accurate and timely

We aim to publish project documents and information about expenditure in a timely, accurate, comparable and detailed manner.  Published Business Cases set out the need, justification and affordability of projects, and include detailed information on costs, benefits and options.  Project annual reviews and completion reports due after April 2011 are now published to show the outcomes achieved from our projects.  This provides information on the full life cycle of projects from concept, through design, implementation, review and completion – including an assessment of final impact on the ground.

In 2011 we sought feedback from users on the availability and accessibility of information on the DFID website.  This showed that more information was wanted on the nature, aims, progress and outcomes of projects and programmes.  In response to this, we redeveloped DFID’s projects database to make information easier to access and understand, and to show more clearly the range of our work across countries and sectors.  Following the revision, the number of visits to the database increased by 32%, with visitors viewing more projects across a range of countries and sectors.  Further improving the website and project database remains an important challenge for the future.  In particular we want to make it easier to trace every pound of aid spent from source to impact on the ground.  We are developing a new Open Data Strategy and Data Quality Improvement Plan to  help achieve this.

We have introduced monthly quality assurance checks to improve the accuracy and quality of published information – and have implemented a monthly ‘lessons learned’ exercise to help spread best practice on transparency across DFID.  Information is timely – with monthly updates of the projects database and information available via IATI - and all information published on our projects database meets government and IATI accessibility standards.

Beyond DFID, the Government has committed to ensuring that details of all UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) – including that spent by other government departments - are transparent.  The UK's Open Government Partnership Action Plan, announced in September 2011, commits all relevant government departments to produce plans within a year to implement IATI compliant transparency for their ODA spend.

Commitment: Information will be published in English and with summary information in major local languages, in a way that is accessible to citizens in countries in which we work

We routinely publish information on UK aid in English, and have made an increasing amount available in major local languages.  A growing number of DFID Country Operational Plans now have summaries published in local languages (eg. in India, Burma, Rwanda) and we have started publishing translated summaries of information from our Business Cases (eg. in Yemen and Tanzania).  A range of other information related to work funded by UK aid is also made available in local languages, but we recognise the scope to be more systematic about meeting this commitment – and continue to seek the most cost-effective ways to do so.

Commitment: We will allow anyone to reuse our information, including to create new applications which make it easier to see where aid is being spent.

We publish information under the Open Government Licence, a worldwide and royalty-free licence which allows others to use and reuse our information freely and flexibly.  The licence allows others to copy, publish, distribute, transmit and adapt our information.  It also allows users to use the information commercially and include it in their own applications.  By publishing our information in the internationally agreed IATI format, we enable it to be more easily reused by others. 

To generate most value from the information we make available, we want it to be used and reused as much as possible.  We have been working with partner organisations to encourage the development of tools that make use of aid information (see examples at aidinfolabs.org), over time making it increasingly easy to see where aid is being spent. An important challenge now is to do more to identify which information is most wanted and needed, and support others to develop the tools and technology needed to get maximum value from using it.

Commitment: We will provide opportunities for those directly affected by our projects to provide feedback on the performance of projects.

We have made it an integral part of DFID’s work to seek feedback from those benefitting from UK aid.  We have set out in Country Operational Plans information on our work to increase opportunities for feedback from those directly affected by our projects, and we have made reporting on such feedback a requirement in project annual reviews.

For example, in Uganda we are supporting the use of mobile phones to track the availability and use of malaria drugs.  And in many countries where we are working in education, we are supporting a range of methods to give parents more opportunity to hold schools and teachers to account, for example through school report cards, school management committees, and by helping communities to  assess the quality of learning.

We have also developed a new Access and Feedback Pilot Programme to identify the best ways to include opportunities for beneficiary monitoring and feedback in our programmes.  This involves looking at further use of technologies such as mobile phones to help people feed back on what works well and where things could be done differently.  As we build up more evidence on the effectiveness of different approaches to enabling feedback, we plan to expand their use across DFID projects to provide further – and better – opportunities for feedback in the future.

Commitment: Requiring, over time, any civil society organisation that is in direct receipt of DFID funds to adhere to similar standards of transparency and accountability, and pushing multilateral organisations to do the same. This means that UK taxpayers will be able to better see where their money is being spent.

DFID’s influence in driving forward the transparency agenda is widely acknowledged by UK civil society organisations.  Organisations in direct receipt of DFID funds through our major grant schemes (Partnership Programme Arrangements and the Global Poverty Action Fund) are now required to apply transparency standards in line with the UK Aid Transparency Guarantee to UK funding from 2012/13, making it easier to follow where and how the money is spent.

By April 2012 all such organisations receiving DFID funding will have established plans with strict timelines setting out when the required information will be published, and by April 2013 they will publish all key project documents, information on expenditure, source of funding and project descriptors in line with IATI standards.  Oxfam GB and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance are already doing so.

We have also pushed multilateral organisations to increase their transparency.  In the Multilateral Aid Review , we assessed organisations on their transparency and accountability.  We found that most needed to improve, and following the review made it clear to multilateral organisations that transparency remains a priority area for reform.  We would like all multilaterals in receipt of UK aid to make comprehensive information about their policies and projects readily available.  We are pushing them to comply with IATI international standards and to meet the transparency commitments agreed at the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.

At the same time, multilateral organisations have made considerable progress on transparency, with a significant number already publishing IATI data, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNDP, the EC and the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria.  Other important multilaterals including the African and Inter-American Development Banks have also joined IATI, with UNICEF soon to follow.

We will keep working with – and challenging – others to make progress under this commitment.

Commitment: Pressing other donors - bilateral, multilateral and non-traditional - to adhere to similar standards of transparency as set out in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) This will make it much easier for people to see all the aid from all donors, and get a full picture of the aid being spent in each country.

The UK has helped put transparency at the top of the international aid agenda, culminating in new global commitments on transparency at the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in December 2011 (where over 150 countries and other key actors agreed a set of commitments on how best to work together to maximise the impact of aid ).  We made transparency a top UK priority for the Forum, and pushed hard for an agreement that included:

• a new shared principle on transparency, committing all Busan participants to be guided by transparency in all of their development cooperation

• a commitment to “improve the availability and public accessibility of information on development cooperation” and to make the full range of information on publicly funded development activities available

• a commitment to agree on a common, open standard for publication of timely and comprehensive aid information - and to publish implementation schedules for doing this by December 2012.

We are now pushing to ensure everyone lives up to these commitments, and that transparency remains at the heart of the new Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation established in Busan.

The UK has also been at the forefront of progress on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) – including as Chair of the Steering Committee.  We have played a key role in developing – and getting agreement to – a common, open standard for publication of aid information – and persuading others to sign up.  IATI participants publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely information on how much and where aid is being spent – and on results when available.  The UK was the first to publish information to the IATI standard.

There are now 29 signatories to IATI, including the USA, World Bank, CDC, the Hewlett Foundation and Oxfam GB.  In total these signatories represent 75% of global Official Development Assistance.  This is very promising, but we need to keep pressing for greater implementation of the standard.

Commitment: Using our influence to encourage developing countries which receive UK aid to become more transparent to their own citizens about their budgets and the aid they receive.

The UK pushed at the Busan High Level Forum for developing countries to increase their transparency.  This helped secure a commitment to improve the availability and accessibility of information on aid and other resources - and to help citizens make better use of this information.  There remains much work to do under this commitment, and we will continue working with others to make progress, including through participation in the new Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency.

We are also encouraging developing countries to be more transparent through our dialogue with governments around the provision of aid.  In 2011, as part of our strengthened approach in countries where we provide budget support, we introduced a new partnership principle which places greater emphasis on transparency and accountability.  This includes a commitment to spend the equivalent of 5% of budget support to help enable citizens to hold governments to account for the use of public resources, including aid.

We are also promoting transparency internationally through the UK’s role in the Open Government Partnership (OGP).  Cabinet Office leads the UK engagement on OGP, with DFID closely engaged on aid transparency and budget transparency in developing countries.  The UK is a key member of the OGP Steering Committee and takes over as co-chair in April 2012 - an opportunity we will use to further influence others to increase their commitment to openness and transparency.

We recognise that people in developing countries need access to good quality information if the benefits of increased transparency are to be fully realised.  We are therefore also using UK aid to strengthen national data and statistical systems.  For example, we are working in the education sector in a number of countries to enable data collection on pupil enrolment, retention, drop-out and completion rates – as well as supporting the collection of data on additional indicators such as teacher attendance.  With access to such information, developing country citizens are better able to hold their governments to account for the provision of services that UK and other aid helps to provide.