Four goals on transparency for the First Global Partnership High Level Meeting

  • April 14, 2014

The First High Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation takes place in Mexico on 15th-16th April. Over 1300 development leaders will join Enrique Peña Nieto, President of Mexico, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría in Mexico City to:

  • review global progress in making development co-operation more effective;
  • agree on actions to boost progress; and,
  • anchor effective development co-operation in the post-2015 global development agenda.

The workshop: considering progress on transparency

Today, a pre-event workshop, ““Unfinished Business: Moving forward to meet the Busan Commitments” will consider progress towards meeting the commitments made in Busan, including those made on transparency. Workshop participants will consider the results of the recently published Global Partnership Monitoring Report, which concludes that “The drive for transparency is starting to show results – but these need to be geared to countries’ needs”.

IATI’s partner country caucus will be well-represented in the workshop session on transparency and accountability, with Steering Committee members Lucretia Ciurea from Moldova and Alimatou Zongo from Burkina Faso on the panel, and several others expected to contribute from the floor. Liz Steele from Publish What You Fund will moderate the debate.

The question posed by this session is “Do we have the right information in the right hands at the right time?” The answer given by the Global Partnership Monitoring Report is “not yet”. This is confirmed by IATI’s recent survey on the information needs of Aid Management Systems (AIMS). 59% of respondents said that the AIMS contained insufficient information to support budget preparation, and the main reasons were ascribed to lack of timely, accurate forward-looking data.

The results of the AIMS survey amplify the demands made by country- based stakeholders at Accra and Busan for timely data (ideally published monthly, but at least quarterly) and forward-looking data (published at activity level for at least one year ahead). The challenge this week in Mexico is to accelerate progress towards meeting the transparency commitments made at Busan, in order to meet the information needs of stakeholders at country level.

Our four key goals on transparency at the GPHLM

The IATI delegation In Mexico will be promoting the following deliverables on transparency in a number of sessions during the workshop:

1)      All Busan endorsers should accelerate efforts to implement the common standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on their development cooperation by December 2015.

2)      Other GPEDC members including South-South Cooperation providers, CSOs and private sector actors should take action to increase the transparency of their development cooperation and financing for development along similar lines.

3)      Developing countries and providers of development cooperation should work together to promote greater use of data, by ensuring sufficient coverage and quality of data published, making progress on automatic data exchange at country level, and building capacity of data managers and users.

4)      There should be a light touch assessment of progress in early 2015 to support providers in identifying further actions necessary to meet their commitments by the December 2015 deadline.