Madrid, 10 April 2014 – Ministers and heads of agencies and multilateral organisations working on development need to accelerate and deepen commitments on aid transparency according to the more than 50 civil society organisations from across the world that have signed a letter to be sent to governments before the first High Level Meeting (HLM) of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation in Mexico on 15–16 April 2014.
Next week, the world’s development actors will meet at the first High Level Meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation in Mexico. The meeting is an opportunity to kick-start efforts to ensure governments’ transparency commitments on development cooperation are met by 2015. Since the last HLM in 2011 in Busan, most information on development cooperation has still yet to be published in a comprehensive, timely and standardized way with the vast majority of donor countries currently off-track in meeting the commitments.
“Commitments by governments to implimenting the International Aid Transaprency Initiative will not only lead to more efficient use of resources, they will help save lives by ensuring money goes where it is really needed, and is not misspent or diverted inappropriately,” stated Helen Darbishire, Executive Director at Access Info Europe, one of the signatories of the CSO letter.
The letter calls on development providers to:
» Accelerate efforts to publish timely, comprehensive and forward-looking data on all development flows in accordance with IATI and improve the quality of published data;
» Ensure information on development cooperation is compatible and aligned with partner countries’ budgets and systems;
» Support specific actions to improve access, dissemination and use of this data by all stakeholders at country level.
In June 2013, the G8 members agreed to implement IATI, and France recently announced its intention to commence publication to the IATI standard in 2014.
You can read a pdf copy of the letter in English 
and Spanish