Aid transparency: the European Commission’s Directorate for International Partnerships joins the top league of the most transparent donors

Today at the launch event of the 2024 Aid Transparency Index (ATI) in Washington DC, it was announced that the Directorate General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA) joined the league of most transparent donors and now ranks in the “top 10”. This is the first time since the creation of this Index that DG INTPA (and a European Commission service) ranks this category. 

European Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, commented:” According to Aid Transparency Index, DG INTPA is one of the top-ranking donors. Accountability and transparency are crucial to the legitimacy of our work, including investment strategy Global Gateway. This result makes me very proud and reflects our longstanding commitment to effective aid. Publishing quality information to the International Aid Transparency Initiative helps donors identify gaps and overlaps and track progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

The high-level political commitment by DG INTPA to transparency has been a key driving force to INTPA’s increased performance in 2024 with a score of 82.9%, which is more than 10 points higher compared to the score in 2022.

DG INTPA had set two targets this year: to publish more reviews and evaluations, and to do it better by facilitating access to already publicly available information, such as project design, planning documents and contracts. 

Added to the good scores of the Directorate General for Directorate General of European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (76%) and of the Directorate General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement (73%), such a result positions the European Commission as a leader in aid transparency.

In details

INTPA’s improvements in 2024:

• Publication of an indicative forward-planning budget for three years
• Publication of awarded contracts
• Publication of reviews and evaluations for our actions

Areas for further improvement:

• Improvement of the quality of descriptions for actions and contracts
• Publication of results of activities

Background

The Commission publishes monthly data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative Standard (IATI) since 2011. IATI provides live, forward-looking, comparable data on development cooperation and humanitarian aid for more than 1 667 organisations. The IATI data is used for the preparation of the Aid Transparency Index (ATI) every two years. 

ATI is the only independent measure of aid transparency among the 50 world’s major development agencies, including the European Commission services INTPA, NEAR and ECHO, the EIB and 10 EU Member States. It is led by the independent organisation “Publish What You Fund”. This Index tracks and measures donors’ progress towards transparency. 

This public comparative ranking of donor agencies, based on a publicly available methodology aims to identify changes needed and galvanise major donors to progressively increase and improve the aid and development information they make available. The assessment is based on 35 indicators such as commitments, contracts or evaluations. 

The launch of the 2024 ATI event was hosted by the Brookings Centre for Sustainable Development.