Asked by: David Ruffley (Conservative - Bury St Edmunds)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she is taking to improve the transparency of bilateral and multilateral aid spending.
Answered by Alan Duncan
The UK continues to lead the world on aid transparency. DFID was a founder of (and the first to publish aid data under) the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Over 230 organisations have now followed this lead. 98% of civil society organisations receiving funding under DFID's Programme Partnership Arrangements are now publishing IATI compliant data.
DFID's Development Tracker has revolutionised the sharing of aid information, enabling public access to details on expenditure and recipients, alongside project documentation. These efforts have been recognised recently, with DFID assessed as the best performing donor in the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation's 2014 monitoring report.
The Multilateral Aid Review (MAR) included transparency and accountability as a key aspect of assessing multilateral partners' performance. DFID is pushing organisations to strengthen their disclosure policies and make project details readily available. This is likely to be examined again in 2015.