Thursday, February 2, 2012

ADB improves Aid Transparency

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is helping provide a clearer picture on how much development aid is provided and received around the world by joining AidFlows, in partnership with the World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The addition of ADB’s data provides an expanded view of the aid picture."New sources of data provide greater transparency, making information easily available to policy and decision makers," said ADB’s director of Strategy and Policy Department Hong Wei. "We are pleased to be a part of AidFlows and the broader open data effort."
AidFlows is a one-of-a-kind website that provides an aggregate view of data on official development aid, including funding from donors, from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and from multilateral development banks like ADB. "Breakdowns are available by amount, sector, and type of financing, from both donor and beneficiary perspectives," the donor added.
The website’s concise, user-friendly format provides a visual portrayal of the volume and structure of aid funding, using charts, graphs and maps to show how much aid is provided by donors and how much is received by beneficiaries.
The goal is to increase transparency by providing the public with a tool for easy access to information such as which countries and which sectors receive how much of global aid, and who the main contributors are at the institutional level. The site also allows users to compare aid flow information between individual countries.
Recently, aid transparency has become a global issue as citizens of donor countries have started questioning their governments about the effectiveness of the aid that they have been providing to developing nations.
Similarly, recipient countries, of late, have also started taking the effectiveness of aid seriously.

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