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Following the Money: Owen Barder On Why Aid Transparency Matters
March 22, 2010
My guest this week is Owen Barder, a visiting fellow here at the Center for the Global Development and the director of the AidInfo project at Development Initiatives, a UK-based NGO. Owen’s current work focuses on improving the transparency of the international aid system—making it easier to know where and how aid is being spent.
Owen explains that more easily available aid data would benefit a number of audiences. Researchers and policymakers need the data to study what aid interventions work best. Developed country taxpayers have a right to information on how government is spending their money. Developing country governments need information on donor spending in order to budget their own resources effectively. However, according to Owen, the most important audience for aid data are the citizens of developing countries-the intended beneficiaries of the spending.
“They need to hold their government to account, they need to hold service delivery organizations to account,” he says. “And to do that, they need to know what services they should be expecting, what money is being allocated, what’s being spent, so they can make sure they’re getting the services they need.”
In our conversation, Owen and I discuss the weak links on making aid transparent. Even donors who make an attempt to publish data on their activities, Owen explains, aren’t generally very good at making that data useful. “They don’t do it from the perspective of ‘how would a citizen in Ethiopia find out about all those activities and pull it together in a format that’s relevant to them?’,” he says.
For that to happen, donors would have to share data in a standard format that could be compiled and remixed by interested third parties, opening the doors to a whole new world of new applications. We discuss a few of these, including consumer ratings for development projects and augmented reality tools that could display data on nearby aid projects on the screen of your mobile phone.
Listen to the Wonkcast to hear the interview. Owen is also quite a prolific blogger and podcaster in his own right—you’ll find more of his work on development and foreign aid on his personal website.
Have something to add to the discussion? Ideas for future interviews? Post a comment below. If you use iTunes, you can subscribe to get new episodes delivered straight to your computer every week.
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4 Responses to “Following the Money: Owen Barder On Why Aid Transparency Matters”
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March 28th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Aid transparency is particularly important in developing countries where donations often get misappropriated owing to poor control systems and rampant corruption. As a result, many donors require detailed structures that ensure money moves through various channels and trickles down to the intended users.
This issue was also touched upon by Prof. Yunus, in Banker to the Poor.
April 6th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
The subject tackled by Mr. MacDonald is an a critical one to my point of view. I feel and have ever more evidences that aid rather enriches staff aid-providers employ, most of whom are from the the donor countries with huge salaries. A dedicated development advisor in my country, Benin, uses to say ” Aid, in its current form, only fights high-brows and executives poverty, and not mass misery”. he is so right that oficial figures point out an increaseing rate of poverty compared to 50 years back. It is clear the so-called development aid, is an “incentive” to more poverty”. And this is exactly what makes MacDonald right: what do beneficiaries must expect? if this can’t be achieved with a long lasting and sensitive impact, then we keep turning errands. What matters is not how many billions are voiced, but how they are provided, manged and what they help accomplish. I am afraid this is not yet the must today!which is so sad. So donors , be more sincere and , accountable, both to you and to your grantees, and require the same from them and from the end beneficiaries.
March 14th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
[...] http://blogs.cgdev.org/global_.....er-on-why-… [...]
May 13th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
[...] Center for Global Development recently did an interview with Owen Barder, the director of the Aid Info Project at Development Initiatives, a UK-based NGO. [...]