See below for a post by MFAN Co-Chairs George Ingram, Carolyn Miles, and Connie Veillette. *** We at MFAN have been eagerly anticipating the beginning of October. Not just because of playoff baseball and the possibility of a Beltway Series, but because with the beginning of October we get the release of Publish What You … Continue reading Root, root, root….for transparency
Please see below for a guest post from MFAN’s Accountability Working Group Co-Chairs, Diana Ohlbaum and Lori Rowley. Ohlbaum is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Rowley is the Director for Global Food Security and Aid Effectiveness at The Lugar Center. *** The first great boon for transparency of U.S. foreign assistance … Continue reading A Tale of Two Websites
See below for a guest post from Ruth Salmon, Research Assistant at Publish What You Fund. Salmon is the lead on data collection for the 2014 Aid Transparency Index. This post originally appeared on Publish What You Fund’s blog on July 7, 2014. *** Data collection continues for the 2014 Aid Transparency Index (ATI). And for the … Continue reading Sampling IATI data round 1: Lessons learned
See below for a guest post from Sarah Rose, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Global Development. The piece originally appeared on CGD’s blog on June 23rd. *** We’re getting closer to knowing how the USG spends its foreign assistance dollars. Recently, the State Department announced its first release of foreign assistance data on … Continue reading ForeignAssistance.gov Is Getting Bigger; Here’s How to Make It Better
See below for a guest post from Publish What You Fund about the recent release of data by the State Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard. *** In the last few weeks the Foreign Assistance Dashboard added two new U.S. agencies to its list of publishers. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published … Continue reading More U.S. agencies publishing aid data to international standard
See below for a guest post from George Ingram, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and MFAN Co-Chair. This post originally appeared on Publish What You Fund on June 13, 2014. *** There are two new agencies publishing information to the foreign assistance dashboard: the State Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This … Continue reading Building aid transparency: more data, better data
These next two years are an important window of opportunity for U.S. aid reform. The midterm elections in 2014 are certain to shake up the membership of Congress. In 2015, the Millennium Development Goals will expire and a new global development agenda will take its place. And 2016 will bring a new administration and further changes in Congress. We urge the Administration and Congress to work together to institutionalize the important reforms that have already been introduced and continue to push forward on strengthening country ownership and accountability.
Development leaders from around the globe will gather in Mexico City next week for the first high-level meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. The Global Partnership was established at the Fourth High Level Forum in Busan in 2011 and brings together a wide range of development actors working towards more effective, sustainable, and impactful development results. Today, 161 countries and 54 organizations have endorsed the Global Partnership Principles, including the United States.
MFAN applauds the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for unanimously approving the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2013 (S. 1271) introduced by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ben Cardin (D-MD). This bipartisan legislation would strengthen U.S. development programs in an era of constrained budget resources by directing U.S. agencies involved in foreign assistance to focus on more coherent, consistent, and transparent monitoring and evaluation to ensure that we get the most out of every dollar we spend on foreign assistance.
The report praised the MCC’s progress on transparency, and congratulated the agency for publishing high-quality information in line with the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), an initiative working to make information about spending on development easier to access, understand, and use. It also pointed out that all of the MCC’s current Compacts and Threshold Programs are published in IATI XML on MCC’s website, and the information on the Foreign Assistance Dashboard includes planning, obligation, and spending data.
