Aid transparency is a frequently talked about agenda, among development partners as well as recipient countries. Over the past decades, aid has become more transparent, despite slow progress.
Parliamentarians, civil society organizations, advocates for freedom of information and citizens in developing countries, who want to hold to account their government and other people delivering services, frequently demand aid transparency. Access to information can potentially transform the relationship between citizens and governments, and also between donors and recipients.
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Aid transparency has the power to reduce corruption, improve decision-making and allocation of resources, empower citizens and support good governance, all prerequisites for creating local ownership and responsibility, and ultimately, successful poverty reduction. Nepal is also taking leadership in collecting aid data and making them transparent through various measures. In this connection, the Aid Management Platform (AMP), an online web-based information system, was set up by the Ministry of Finance in 2010 with support from UNDP, Denmark and DFID. [break]
All development partners have been given access to AMP, and are required to update information on their projects and disbursements in line with the national budget cycle. In addition, access to AMP has been provided to all line ministries, including the National Planning Commission. Similarly, access has been given to about 35 INGOs to include information on INGO core funding in Nepal along with necessary training on AMP data entry.
Currently, more than 40 development partners have been reporting aid information to AMP and the Ministry of Finance has been able to produce aid related documents like Development Cooperation Report, TA book and District Aid Profile based on AMP data. The data has been used to prepare the national budget. Moreover, the Aid Transparency Index is prepared through AMP and is reviewed periodically as an incentive for donors to update aid disbursement data. It has filled significant gaps in government knowledge of trends in aid allocation.
The AMP has allowed the government to take increased ownership of aid and work towards strengthening alignment, harmonization, management of results, and mutual accountability. This ownership is expected to enable the government to better manage and coordinate development assistance.
The Ministry of Finance has recently launched Aid Management Platform public portal, giving free access to the wider public through its website. AMP data includes commitments, disbursements, project information, visualization dashboards, and mapping tools. Nepal has pioneered to be one of the few countries giving public access to aid information. This could be regarded as an information revolution in the area of aid transparency.
Various stakeholders including those interested in the aid flow of Nepal could be benefitted from AMP public portal in many ways. The portal facilitates aid information supplemented by map and diagrams. Various reports could be generated from the portal. The portal will be useful for the citizens, government, parliamentarians and people working in the development community. This will facilitate line ministries and even INGOs to work together and enhance sectoral coordination through project information available in the portal.
Visualization facility of aid information through map in the portal will further help development partners and government policymakers to use aid money in critical areas and avoid duplication of efforts. It will also be useful to citizens who want to check whether the government is keeping its promises.
It will make development partners accountable and also reduce their administrative costs because they may not need to publish their information frequently and respond to multiple information requests. It will also help development partners who want to coordinate their spending with that of other donors. This will encourage development partners to update their aid information. This can reduce duplication and improve synergies, as well as reducing the growing burden of reporting on an ad hoc basis, whenever they are asked.
Besides, it will help community based organizations and CSOs who want to know the resources available and influence how they are used. This will help citizens of development partner’s country to know where their aid money goes and how it is used. Likewise, anti-corruption activists can track the government’s aid receipts and expenditures to find out whether money is being siphoned off. Similarly, journalists and researchers can investigate how effectively aid is being spent.
The availability of AMP portal offers an important opportunity to improve aid effectiveness and transparency, allowing the government to take increased ownership of aid and to strengthen alignment, and encourage mutual accountability.
Aid transparency is not only limited to transparency within the government and donor community. Foreign aid affects our country as a whole and the availability of aid information through public website is an effort to help empower the media, civil society, concerned citizens, and the wider public to better understand the foreign aid scenario in Nepal, which can help in the creation of better solutions for making foreign aid in Nepal more effective.
The author is associated with Aid Management and Coordination Project under Ministry of Finance
tilakman@hotmail.com
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