One of the four principles that Global Washington identified in its 2009 white paper on global aid effectiveness and highlighted in its 2010 policy paper is “Transparency and Accountability” — information on strategy, goals, and spending [should be] clear and readily available to U.S. taxpayers and international beneficiaries.
It turns out that Global Washington is in line with much of the rest of the world in its call for transparency. Publish What You Fund, a London-based group, is sponsoring a global campaign for aid transparency, in preparation for the upcoming High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Korea in early December.
The upcoming High Level Forum will be the fourth such forum sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). At the third forum, held in Accra, Ghana, in 2008, OECD issued the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which included the following action:
“We will make aid more transparent. Developing countries will facilitate parliamentary oversight by implementing greater transparency in public financial management, including public disclosure of revenues, budgets, expenditures, procurement and audits. Donors will publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely information on volume, allocation and, when available, results of development expenditure to enable more accurate budget, accounting and audit by developing countries.”
Publish What You Fund is working with a global coalition of partners, including U.S.-based Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), to collect organizations willing to sign onto a petition urging governments and other donors to make their aid more transparent. Global Washington has recently signed onto the petition, and urges individual members to sign on as well.