The IDB became a signatory to the Inter-national Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) yesterday, at a ceremony hosted at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea.
In a press release, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) said Executive Vice President Julie T Katzman and Richard Calvert, Director General for Finance and Corporate Performance of the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom, on behalf of the IATI, participated in the signing ceremony. The IATI is a voluntary, multi-stakeholder effort aimed at making information about aid spending easier to find, use and compare.
Katzman said the IDB is committed to providing its stakeholders with complete, timely, and easy to understand and use information regarding its activities and most importantly its results. Over the past two years, the IDB has increased its focus on results and made important strides in boosting transparency to ensure stakeholders can track that progress, To that end, it has implemented a more comprehensive access to information policy, built a new Indepen-dent Consultation and Investigative Mechanism, and publishes an annual Deve-lopment Effectiveness Overview to report on progress on achieving development results.
“We are the only Multilateral Development Bank to have a minimum threshold for each project that goes to our Board that identifies the extend to which a project’s design will allow for results to be measured and evaluated,” Katzman said. She also noted that the IDB publishes its projects’ execution progress annually and it continues to improve and increase the percentage of projects that include rigorous impact evaluations in order to ensure that it achieves its expected results and “know what works and what does not.”
Katzman, who serves as the IDB’s Chief Operating Officer, said the IDB’s next step is to create innovative tools that can make information even more accessible, comprehensive and insightful. In Busan, as head of the IDB delegation, she also chaired a high level panel discussion on South-South and Triangular Cooperation and was a speaker in a panel on gender equality.
Calvert, who represented the IATI at the signing, said he welcomed the IDB’s commitment to IATI. “The public mood of today demands more transparent approaches in terms of accountability to our taxpayers,” he said, adding that “This signature in Busan is really relevant in that the outcome document recognises transparency as one of the core principles of effective development.”
According to the release, last year, as part of an agreement with shareholders for the IDB’s ninth capital increase, the Bank’s Board of executive Directors approved a new Access to Information Policy that requires disclosure of most documents related to Bank-funded projects and board meetings. The policy also provides requesters who are denied access to information with the ability to appeal to an external panel.
The IDB also said such disclosure policies are quickly becoming the standard for international financial institutions and non-profit aid organisations, as donors and recipients both endeavour to keep track of and evaluate the effectiveness of aid flows to developing countries through a variety of different channels. IATI members agree to adhere to common standards for sharing information so that meaningful comparisons can be made.
