2. bond.org.uk
A Reminder: Why Be Transparent?
• Right to Information perspective: transparency re
public funding
• Transparency as a first step to improving
accountability; exposure to scrutiny and feedback
• By donors and supporters
• By those your work is intended to help
• Improving coordination across aid providers: who
is providing what, where and when? Requires use
of a common standard
• Who knows what uses other people may find for
your data? Research, journalism…
• Active vs Passive transparency; donor publishing
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3. bond.org.uk
Audiences for Transparency
• Beneficiaries: varied methods, linked to work on
“beneficiary feedback”
• Individual supporters: website as a key method;
generate funds and retain public trust
• Donors: IATI as the common standard
• DFID contractual requirement (UK Aid Transparency
Guarantee); others to follow?
• Southern Governments: Aid Information
Management Systems and IATI to coordinate aid
and budget data (and monitor NGOs?)
• Media
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7. bond.org.uk
IATI and UK NGOs – the story to date
• UK NGOs constitute 132 out of 229 publishers
globally to IATI as of 28/2/14
• Of whom
• i.e. publishing to IATI is primarily a compliance
exercise at present (only 10% of NGOs are
publishing anything on non-DFID funding)
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DFID Minimum
Fields
> DFID Minimum
Fields
DFID Funding
Only
71 47
DFID + Other
Funding
13 1
8. bond.org.uk
Why not publish more?
• Too much hassle to publish to IATI (staff time,
systems), and not funded to do so
• Can’t see evidence of the value of publishing/ of
data being used – yet!
• Don’t use the data themselves
• But is culture and behaviour also a problem? Is
there too much fear about being open? Or do we
not think about it enough?
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9. bond.org.uk
Bond’s Transparency Assessment
• New survey to be launched in April
• Based on consultations with Bond Transparency Working
Group
• Aims to review NGOs’ websites for transparency and make
recommendations for improvements
• Indicators are based on a set of information that NGOs
would be expected to make available
• Does not assume that supporters, beneficiaries and others
would always seek out this information, but it is reassuring
to know it is there
• Low cost to achieve high scores
• Indicators reflect Bond Charter, INGO Accountability
Charter…
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10. bond.org.uk
What is Covered?
• Open Information Policy
• Organisational Information (mission and strategy)
• Governance
• Financial information
• Activities
• Results
• 3 levels for each area, plus a “star” for making
information comparable (e.g. via IATI, use of
Evidence Principles)
• Considers volume published, frequency,
timeliness and accessibility
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11. bond.org.uk
How the Assessment Will Work
• Organisations self-nominate to be assessed
• Bond will review websites against the indicators
• NGO can check score before being finalised
• Tailor-made report and recommendations
showing your score and the range/ average for all
those assessed
• Overall report on the exercise showing
anonymised data – ranges and averages (no
“naming and shaming”)
• Based on recommendations from the
Transparency Working Group
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12. bond.org.uk
What we hope will happen…
• Individual organisations given ideas for simple
ways to increase transparency
• Organisations think of their websites as a vehicle
for transparency
• Remove some of the fear of publishing
• Inject some healthy competition around
transparency!
• Becomes an annual survey
• Enables us to communicate the transparency of
the sector publicly
• Follow-up services, e.g. support on Open Info
Policies, consultants for website improvement…
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13. bond.org.uk
Let us know…
If you would like to participate in the assessment, email:
transparency@bond.org.uk
• We aim to start the survey in late April/ early May
• Report in June
• Stay in touch by signing up to the Transparency Working
Group at my.bond.org.uk
• (Next meeting: April 30th)
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Editor's Notes
The reasons for being transparent are predominantly about a belief in transparency as a value, not because we have proof that the benefits of it significantly outweigh the costs.Analogy with the principle of equity/ inclusion: we don’t do it because we’ve done a cost-benefit analysis about whether it is a worthwhile thing to do; we do it because it’s a core value – it’s something we believe is right.
In the UK, DFID’s requirement for their grantees has led some to see DFID as the main audience for being transparent. Others are strongly focused on “downwards” transparency and see other stakeholders as secondary at best. INGOs tend to ignore southern governments as an audience.
IATI compliance has been the most prominent focus for transparency efforts in the last 3 years. When you enter your own data, all you see is stuff like the above, which doesn’t seem very useful. And indeed there has been relatively little evidence of IATI data being used for improving coordination or enhancing accountability to date. But that is not to say that the data isn’t useful: we’re still trying to break that Catch 22 when people don’t publish data because they don’t think it will be used, and others don’t generate uses for the data because there’s not enough data published to be useful.
However, more uses of data are starting to emerge, e.g. Sweden’s Open Aid platform on this page, giving graphic illustration of where aid goes, what it is used for, and who implements it. And DFID’s Development Tracker on the next page, which includes project documentation.
We recognise that most DFID-funded organisations only publish the minimum required by DFID to IATI, or provide only a couple of extra fields of data on their DFID grants. Only 10% of NGOs currently publishing to IATI voluntarily publish on activities other than those funded by DFID (kudos to Restless Development!).One of our ultimate hopes is that more people publish more data on more of their activities, and – in parallel – that data is put to increasing use by a range of audiences. But perhaps it is more realistic in the short term to encourage and support organisations to publish more information on their own websites.
Compare with Dutch approach: more voluntary and organic initially before being made compulsory; more integrated into reduced reporting requirements.Own use of the data: particularly relevant in the case of federated organisations or even when different offices in the same organisation have data systems that don’t talk to one another and produce the “big picture”.
