Why Transparency is Not Enough

These days, it's all about transparency. Most recently, the U.K.'s new Minister for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, has joined USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah in putting greater transparency about aid operations at the top of his agenda.

Which is great, right? Transparency is clearly a good thing: more information about how much aid goes where and what it achieves is useful. It’s for this reason that so many groups advocate for greater aid openness and organizations working to actually open the data up — like Publish What You Fund, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, AidData, etc. — exist.

We need to be wary, however. Getting more data to analyze isn’t a very good end result in itself. What's important is a concrete impact for developing countries and overall aid effectiveness. So we need to think carefully about how we can use transparency to improve aid — and just opening up data to the public won’t help. After all, in most donor countries, when it comes to the voting booth, voters don't care enough about aid. What's more, in developing countries, civil society often lacks the capacity to access and regularly analyze data. It’s also not clear how pressure from such developing country sources would actually influence donor aid priorities, anyway — there isn’t any direct mechanism for accountability there.

What’s more, the data that is being published is mainly on aid flows — not on effectiveness. In other words, we can easily see how much money goes where, but not what it actually achieves.

We're still a long way away from databases that can tell us what individual projects achieve, or more importantly, what an entire portfolio of activities is contributing to on a national scale. Even among professional and academic economists armed with the latest techniques and most comprehensive data, these questions are very difficult to answer.

In short, there are reasons to fear that greater transparency may not change anything, after all: more data will be published, but it won’t be used to push development actors to improve, and it won’t contribute to our knowledge about where and when aid is having an effect. If data is published without efforts to improve the way it's managed, distributed and used by donors and recipients, then that isn’t much to celebrate.

So what do we need to do to make the transparency drive effective? There are two key factors. One: We need to make sure that public data can easily be analyzed to become meaningful data. Obviously, not everyone will spend hours playing around with numbers until they’ve worked out rates of return or the predictability of aid flows. Data publication needs to be supplemented by analyses that are easily understood and disseminated, and which tell us something about how much good our aid is doing. Such analyses shouldn't just tell us how much money is being spent, but also how well it's being spent.

Secondly, and just as importantly, we need to make sure that levers for accountability actually exist — that when people complain or make suggestions for aid, they are heard. In donor countries, this means ensuring that relevant agency heads are responsive to their critics (for eg., through regular forums), and that aid agencies behave in the same fashion.

In recipient countries, both government and civil society need assistance in monitoring the data to determine how aid received deviates from their actual needs. They, too, also need channels to use that knowledge to hold donors accountable — and that's the hardest part of all. Yes, transparency is important. But what's far more important is ensuring that aid recipients can harness the information to determine how such aid is used.

Photo Credit: AMagill