CanWaCH reflects on the 2024 Aid Transparency Index

This week, Publish What You Fund launched their 2024 Aid Transparency Index. The live-streamed event was hosted at the Brookings Center for Sustainable Development in Washington, DC, and is available online.

For more than a dozen years, the Index has reported on the transparency of the world’s largest providers of aid, leveraging data available through the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). This year, the Index launch highlighted many positive findings, with 2024 reporting the highest recorded average scores among donors, as well as an overall increase in timely publication and availability of reported performance data.

Unfortunately, it was not such a good news story for Canada. Between the 2022 Index and today, Global Affairs Canada’s score dropped by 11 points, bringing Canada to the bottom of the ‘Good’ category, and our ranking to 31 out of 50 donors. This marks Canada’s lowest ranking in the last decade, and represents a drop of more than 20 points from our highest score in 2020, where we ranked in the highest classification bracket. Of course, this is disappointing for a department who was once the chair of the IATI governance board, demonstrating a significant commitment to publishing clear and useful assistance data. 

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) is the largest funder of Canadian official development assistance, and an international champion for often-neglected areas of global health, gender equality and humanitarian response. We know that the department has a strong appetite for transparency and accountability. Despite a low aggregate score, GAC ranked extremely high on published commitments to transparency.

We also know that the data is there. Through CanWaCH’s own Project Explorer — a sector-sourced, open access dashboard with the most comprehensive information on Canada’s global health and development investments — our mandate is to build on Canada’s public data with timely content from Canadian actors and partners. This tool, developed in partnership with GAC, includes detailed project descriptions, budgets, performance data including expected and achieved results, detailed population descriptions and participating/partner organization details — data that is rarely available in the large published sets.

At the most recent IATI Member Assembly in Bogotá, CanWaCH had the opportunity to meet with diverse governments and data stakeholders from around the world. As co-chair of the CSO Caucus, we spoke at length with civil society partners about the importance of useful data — data that supports research, as well as decision-making, planning, independent journalism, funding allocations, gap spotting and so much more. To fulfill that wishlist, we need timely performance and funding data. 

Addressing Canada’s underwhelming performance in these key areas is a collective task. Going forward, Canada and its partners should focus on: 

1. Investing in the human resources, technology and data literacy needed to improve accuracy, consistency and timeliness. 
2. Knowledge of and engagement with global data standards and governance processes.
3. Establishing and implementing report and results management systems that are significantly more streamlined, practical and efficient.

While this year’s story might not be one of high scores or high praise for Canada, it should encourage all of us working in this sector to think about our own organizational and professional commitments to data transparency, coordination and accountability.