WB Hailed as Global Aid Transparency Leader

The World Bank welcomes a new report released today from Publish What You Fund that rates the Bank as "best performer" in terms of aid transparency and ranks the institution No.1 out of 58 donors in the index.

"We're very pleased to receive this important validation of our openness and accountability agenda from Publish What You Fund," said World Bank Managing Director Caroline Anstey. "We still have more to do, but we're committed to show how much funding we're providing, where the funds are going, and what results the money has achieved. It's not just about making aid and aid agencies more open and accountable, it's fundamentally about democratizing development."

The report, the 2011 pilot Aid Transparency Index follows the 2010 Aid Transparency Assessment produced by Publish What You Fund, a UK-based coalition of civil society organizations working on governance, aid effectiveness, and access to information. The 2010 Assessment had also ranked the World Bank as the highest-performing donor among 30 major donors.

The new Index assesses the availability of specific information items at organizational, country, and activity level for 58 donor organizations, including bilateral and multilateral donors, International Financial Institutions, and private foundations. While no organization made it into the top group (+80 percent) the World Bank received an overall score of 78 percent, more than double the average score of 34 percent.

The Index is being released in the run-up to the 4th High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness being held November 29 – December 1 in Busan, South Korea. At a previous High-Level Forum in 2008, in Accra, Ghana, donors resolved to "make aid more transparent" and launched the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), of which the World Bank is a signatory.

"The World Bank (IBRD/IDA) should be congratulated on its early publication to the IATI Registry and should continue to improve the quality of this data," said the Pilot Aid Transparency Index.

About the World Bank's "Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions" Initiative

The World Bank Group is actively working to make its operations and its research more open, transparent and accountable. This includes a range of reforms that enable free access to data that had either previously not been available or available only to paying subscribers. In a speech on September 29, 2010 at Georgetown University, World Bank President, Robert B. Zoellick described the new Open Data, Open Knowledge, and Open Solutions initiative, as a fundamentally new way of searching for development solutions, in a networked development architecture, where none dominates and all can play a part. Through this initiative, the Bank is supplementing its "elite retail" model of economic research, which had economists focusing on specific issues and then writing papers, with a "wholesale" and networked model, that gives outsiders the data, research and software to reach their own findings.