Hi and welcome to an NZADDs update,
Transparency should be central to aid: it’s our money being spent, and unless donors are transparent, we have no way of knowing how it’s being used.
As I’ve pointed out in the past, New Zealand’s government aid programme has had something of a transparency problem. Even finding out basics, like how much we plan to spend next year, has involved pulling apart Treasury spreadsheets and interrogating uncooperative PDFs. The problem was so bad that the OECD raised it in their last review of New Zealand aid.
MFAT, to their credit, have had a team working hard on improving aid transparency for a number of years now. The end product of this hard work was released recently: MFAT’s DevData website.
Needless to say I have some criticisms (I’m an academic, after all). But the website has many strengths. Once you’ve learnt how to click your way around, you can find very helpful information about individual aid projects (for an example, click here). There could be more information (lists of recent evaluations for example), but it’s now easy — for almost every aid project that MFAT runs — to find out what it is, where it’s based, what it involves, and how much money has been spent. This is a big step forward. It’s also possible to download data, which is very helpful.
The main issue with the site at present is, oddly enough, its high-level reporting: the site states how much New Zealand spent on aid in total last financial year, and it states how much we spent in the previous five years, which is nice to know, but simple annual totals would be much better. Then people could track trends. And there’s nothing on key international measures such as aid/GNI.
There’s also nothing on the website to suggest that useful information will be released about planned spending on budget night.
This all undermines the website’s usefulness to the average researcher, or journalist, or citizen who wants a quick snapshot of where New Zealand aid has been, and where it’s going.
Hopefully, these are problems that can be fixed going forward.
And that brings me back to the good news: a website has been built and set up, which hopefully means there is all sorts of potential to build on the existing platform in the name of even greater transparency. And, in the meantime, New Zealanders’ can now go to a single website and get good information about the projects their taxes are funding. It’s an excellent start.
Hopefully, New Zealand aid has turned a corner, and transparency will only increase further from here.
Terence
New Zealand Aid and Development Dialogues 