26 October 2010

Kudos to the World Bank

The clear winner of Publish What You Fund’s new aid transparency ranking. The US clearly needs some work (vindication for AidWatch?).

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Posted by Lee Labels: , ,

3 comments:

Ranil Dissanayake said...

Hi Lee -

The WB almost certainly (haven't read the paper yet, due to work pressures! have it saved for later) is getting a huge score because of the Client Connection. The CC provides, in WB formats, info on everything they do. The problem is they are extremely inflexible when local Governments ask them to classify aid in any other way, in order to run the analyses that the local context needs. I'm dubious of these high-level transparency initiatives ever since I heard the shocking story of people from one of these transparency advocates groups (I won't name them just in case it's incorrect, though I trust the source) trying to tell donors in country x that they were providing *too much* info locally, since they wanted them to instead feed the information upwards into a master database.

This pissed me off no end. The people who need transparency most are the ones in country, and they are the ones least well served by all this push to global transparency.

I'll blog about this one day, when I get the time.

October 27, 2010 at 2:55 PM
Lee said...

Would a hypothetical real-transparency-on-the-ground index change the ordering though?

October 27, 2010 at 3:42 PM
Ranil Dissanayake said...

Good question. I'm not sure, but suspect it would depend rather a lot on the country offices. From my experience of a few countries, I'd say Norway, DfID and Germany seem to be consistently good performers - basically donors where country offices have some autonomy and control of finances.

October 28, 2010 at 8:29 AM

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