A top 5 donor, Japan is critical piece of aid transparency puzzle, says advocacy group
WASHINGTON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Japan, one of the world’s largest donor countries, for the first time has released data on its foreign development aid in line with global standards for aid transparency.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), which maintains an aid registry and sets standards for timely release of data in a way that is easy to compare, said that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) have published aid and development programmes and overseas development assistance loans.
Japan’s two agencies, which account for the vast majority of its overseas development aid, gave $13.9 billion in 2013, against $15 billion the year earlier.
Publish What You Fund - the transparency group that campaigns for more openness over how much governments, NGOs and development institutions donate and lend to countries as a way to make development aid more effective - welcomed Japan’s move.
“It remains among the top five donors today, so we consider them a critical piece of the aid transparency puzzle. We are glad to see this move towards publishing to IATI, and we look forward to seeing more information being published this way in future,” Publish What You Fund said in an email.
So far 256 organisations have released details of their foreign development aid in line with the standards agreed by the IATI, which is a partnership of governments and civil society groups. Twenty governments have met the standards, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and United Kingdom.
The idea for IATI sprung from a 2008 meeting of experts in Accra, Ghana, to improve aid effectiveness when the volume of foreign aid was declining after the global financial crisis.
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