New initiatives seek aid leaks

More than a hundred billion euros in donations are given to aid organizations every year, but studies have found that the money doesn't always reach the people and projects it's intended for.

In March last year, the United Nations Somalia Monitoring Group found that up to half the food aid that had been sent to Somalia never reached hungry people. Instead, it was diverted into a web of corrupt contractors, Islamist militants and local UN staff.

These levels of corruption and inefficiency have prompted increasing calls for greater accountability over aid organizations and governments.

In June this year, the "Make Aid Transparent" campaign coalition was launched - consisting of 97 civil society organizations - ahead of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness that will take place in South Korea at the end of this year.

Tracking money flows

With billions of euros being donated to thousands of aid organizations around the world, for everything from health and education to climate issues, it's impossible to track where all the money flows.

According to Beris Gwynne, director of World Vision's office in Geneva, publishing information openly about the activities of aid organizations is one way of ensuring that the resources go where they're needed.

Gwynne pointed to cases where donors developed assistance programs, for example in the field of say health or education, and the receiving countries "ended up either with buildings that were not appropriate for that climate, or they ended up with three schools in the same location."

"Those problems could have been avoided by a simple exchange of information on who was doing what, where," Gwynne added.

Recipient governments need to know how much money is coming in order to budget accordingly. Tracking aid each step of the way illustrates who takes a cut, and where corruption takes place.

When large amounts of money are allocated to a national government, Gwynne told Deutsche Welle, "then a proportion of that is allocated to the provincial government, an even smaller proportion of that is allocated to the town."

"The beneficiary is left wondering: 'if 3 million dollars was allocated, why am I only getting 100,000 dollars for my school?'," Gwynne said.

Seeing where the money is going one way communities can hold their local officials accountable.

International standards

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) was launched in 2008 as a compendium of donors, recipient country governments and civil society organizations. The initiative has created a set of reporting standards and definitions for donors.

Aidinfo Program Officer Isabel Bucknall, who works mainly for the technical advisory group of the International Aid Transparency Initiative, emphasized the importance of establishing standards.

"Each different organisation is reporting to several different reporting standards, and some organisations don't even report to a standard at all," Bucknall told Deutsche Welle.

Data produced under an international open data standard "can become comparable and much more accessible to users," she said.

IATI has been endorsed by 43 countries and donors, including the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.

A common data standard is hoped to allow not just governments, but also nongovernmental organizations and foundations to publish data in the same format, in order to better understand "all the resource flows into one country," Bucknall added.

In any case, Bucknall said that some data could be excluded, for reasons of security or commercial interests.

Bucknall cited an example from the United Kingdom, where the government has published data on its work in Afghanistan, but left out the name of the person who cleaned the windows of their office there, "because it was a security risk to that person."

Direct feedback

While IATI works at the donor level, a new platform called TransparentAid, a privately funded organization based in London and Nigeria, talks directly with communities receiving aid to evaluate its effectiveness.

The group's pilot assignment has been to assess a small project run by a German NGO, the Heinrich Böll foundation, in northern Nigeria.

TransparentAid co-founder Fola Yahaya told Deutsche Welle the project was designed to train a small group to give legal advice to the poor. "They provide free legal advice on very basic issues, such as domestic abuse, property issues, police issues," Yahaya explained.

TransparentAid held workshops with local beneficiaries to ask what they thought about the project - to the surprise of locals.

"They were unused to being asked what they thought about aid, they're normally just the end recipients," said Yahaya, adding that it was "a huge shock that we even bothered asking their opinion in the first place."

Through a lively and constructive debate, locals shared their tips and suggestions on how the Heinrich Böll project can be improved. According to Yahaya, this kind of direct feedback is essential in effectively evaluating aid programs.

External consultants may be lacking in evaluation methodology, and not understand local cultural sensitivities, Yahaha explained. Local evaluators from the region, on the other hand, can critically facilitate responses from beneficiaries and participants.

"So having a network of local evaluators from the country and in-country means that you're much more likely to get real answers to real questions," said Yahaya.

Growing momentum

Transparency can give donors powerful insight into what actually works, and challenges the top-down design of most aid projects.

While organizations in the past have been hesitant to publish data on their programs, many in the field think that the current climate and trend towards open data is assisting in a paradigm shift toward greater transparency.

For example, even the World Bank is now publishing important data in user-friendly ways.

Even though the International Aid Transparency Initiative is voluntary, Isabel Bucknall pointed to the fact that the UK government, for one, has realized its importance, and asked all the NGOs they fund to report under the IATI standard.

Transparency is also thought to increase public trust in government and NGO aid spending, because the public can see where the money goes.

If organizations implement the AITI standards, "you can begin to identify where the possible leakages of money are, either through mismanagement of funds or through corruption," said Bucknall.

Germany is among the biggest donors worldwide, contributing more than 8.6 billion euros to foreign aid. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development is a signatory of IATI.

While other major organizations have already published their data, Germany will follow suit by the first half of next year.

Author: Cinnamon Nippard
Editor: Sonya Angelica Diehn