Aid agency shows biggest transparency improvement
The Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) has made significant improvements in its ranking for donor transparency compared with last year. However, there is still room for improvement such as joining the Open Government Partnership.
With a score of 53.8%, Switzerland has moved up to 18th place in the Aid Transparency IndexExternal link (ATI) in 2014 compared with 44th place in 2013, making it the biggest improver this year. It is now placed in the “fair” group of donors, a significant leap from being categorised in the “very poor group” last year.
Switzerland began publishing information to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard in November 2013, which helped boost its ranking. The SDC also made a statementExternal link on transparency on its website this year which is accompanied by all its activities and commitments regarding aid transparency.
According to the assessment, the SDC performs best on basic activity and classifications information, scoring over 90% and 80% respectively for these sub-groups.
However, the assessment indicates that there is still room for improvement. The SDC’s IATI publication is still missing some important fields and the agency does not publish results, sub-national location information or impact appraisals consistently for all its projects. Another criticism is Switzerland’s failure to join the Open Government PartnershipExternal link.
Consolidation
An SDC spokesperson told swissinfo.ch that the focus in 2015 would be the consolidation of the measures initiated. This will include expanding the information content of the project database and adapting it to the requirements of transparency commitments as well as users.
The SDC also intends to analyse the performance of other donors assessed in the ATI in order to look for any opportunities to improve. The spokesperson also shared that the Swiss government was investigating the possibility of participating in the Open Government Partnership.
The ATI rankings, created by London-based organisation Publish What You Fund, aim to increase accountability among both donors and recipients of development assistance. In order to be assessed, donors must meet certain criteria like spending over $1 billion (CHF950 million) in aid, be a major aid agency or be already accountable to government or organisation-wide transparency commitments.
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