When the budget was released in May, I lamented New Zealand’s lack of government aid transparency. (Read the Devpolicy blog here, or the NZADDs budget update here.)
To its credit, MFAT has now placed some very helpful aid data on its website. In particular, it states how much it plans to spend over the next three years in each of its main Pacific partners and Timor Leste, as well as regional totals for the rest of the world.
To be clear, this isn’t the end of our transparency woes. There are other areas where more information is still in short supply. To give one example, it would be great if the 23 four-year international development cooperation plans for country and other programmes were placed online when finalised.
Nevertheless, this is a real transparency improvement and the Aid Programme deserves credit for it. (Thanks also to the Twitter user who alerted me to the new data.)
Terence for NZADDs admin.
New Zealand Aid and Development Dialogues 