Most international donor countries and agencies are not transparent enough in what they spend aid money on, and could give people the wrong impression about where it is spent, a U.K.-based lobby group said on Thursday.
Approximately $150 billion was donated to global development projects last year. Taxpayers in rich donor countries, and people in the mainly poor countries receiving the funds, should know exactly where the money is going, says Publish What You Fund. The group published an index of countries and agencies based on their transparency rating.
The annual donation from donor countries and agencies was about the same size as the Greek bailout plan approved by the European Union and International Monetary Fund last month, the group said. That far outweighs the amount donated by charities including the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Oxfam, and others.
Major donor countries, including the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, and Spain scored relatively low in terms of transparency, according to the data.
China, Malta, Cyprus, and Greece were among the countries with the lowest transparency rating.
The lobby group noted that the overall rating average, however, was low and called on international donors to increase their transparency efforts. There were no countries or agencies listed as “good” or above 80 percent.
Instead, the top-rated agency on the list was the World Bank, which had a rating of 78 percent. It was followed by the multinational Global Fund, which supports efforts against infectious disease; then the African Development Bank, while the Dutch Foreign Ministry and the United Kingdom Department for International Development followed.
“These results are very disappointing. Most donors are simply not providing enough good information about their aid. This lack of transparency leads to waste, overlap and inefficiency,” stated Karin Christiansen, the managing director of Publish What You Fund.
Christiansen said that transparency makes it much harder for corruption to fester while improving the overall efforts to reduce poverty in recipient countries.
“At a time when overseas aid budgets are under pressure, transparency and accountability matter more than ever,” she said.
The report noted some troubling trends, including a lack of data on the Ivory Coast, one of France’s largest aid recipients. Practically the only information available on the country was in relation to a project commemorating two decades of chimpanzee research.
Greece provided virtually no information on its aid activities and merely published pictures of half-built Serbian apartments in 2009 as evidence of its work, the transparency group said. In another example, Austria was the fourth largest recipient of aid handed out by the Austrian Development Agency, according to government data on its “agreed contracts.”
USAID, the largest donor arm of the United States, was ranked among the lowest of agencies and countries on the index. Publish What You Fund said, the USAID “website is slow to load and often gets stuck, and although it appears to list all projects in Afghanistan, there are no project budgets or total amounts provided.”
China ranked 55th overall and published “no information systematically on its aid activities,” the group said. It only received a single point for data released via the Freedom of Information Act.
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