On Monday, Oct. 3 (10 AM EST), Development Gateway will host a discussion with the author of a new report by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) on the World Bank’s governance and anti-corruption strategy.

The idea that well-governed countries are better able to foster economic opportunities, deliver services to the poor, and fight corruption became prominent among aid agencies in the 1990s. In 2007, the Bank’s governance and anticorruption (GAC) strategy reaffirmed its commitment to supporting country efforts to develop accountable and effective states. Entering its fourth year of implementation, the strategy seeks to increase the number of programs and projects addressing GAC issues.

The IEG study assesses the relevance and the effectiveness of the World Bank's 2007 strategy. A key feature is its benchmarking of the Bank’s country-level engagement on GAC issues, before and after the 2007 strategy. To improve performance, the study recommends a number of innovations: new financial instruments, better ways of measuring governance performance, a more harmonized and consistent approach to risk management, and a more strategic allocation of the World Bank’s internal resources.

Navin Girishankar, who led the study, will present its findings on whether the World Bank is contributing to good governance in developing countries, whether the strategy is making a difference, and the lessons learned for the broader development community.

To attend in person at Development Gateway's office (1889 F St, NW, 2nd Floor; Washington, DC 20006), please RSVP to ekallaur@developmentgateway.org by Friday, Sept. 30. Or, watch online--you can submit questions in advance or during the event to ekallaur@developmentgateway.org, or via tweet using the hashtag #GACEval.

Even the highest-scoring countries — Norway and Japan — barely reached a 50 percent score across the criteria evaluated. A look at how funds are being allocated reveals a murky and complicated underside to the commitments made two years ago in Copenhagen. There are grave concerns that funds previously promised or expected for basic needs such as health and education are being diverted for climate projects.

“Transparency is as important for taxpayers in the North as it is for climate-vulnerable countries in the South,” says Dr. Saleemul Huq, senior fellow in the climate change group at IIED. “Transparent reporting is essential to enable recipient countries to plan their responses to climate change and for civil society to hold governments to account on their promises.”

The authors call for an international registry of funds that provides comprehensive, detailed, consistent and transparent accounting and reporting measures at the project level. A transparent system, they argue, is essential to build much-needed trust and to jointly achieve the critical global goal to reduce emissions and protect those people most vulnerable to climate change.

J. Timmons Roberts is the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. David Ciplet is a PhD student at Brown University.

The Transparency of Chinese Aid: An Analysis of The Published Information on Chinese External Financial Flows is a newly released report that examines the information that is currently available on Chinese assistance to developing countries. Co-published by Publish What You Fund and the Centre for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University, the report outlines how Chinese aid reporting differs from Western methods and assesses the prospects for improving the transparency of China's foreign assistance.

Lead author Sven Grimm and a team of co-authors explore the fragmented state of Chinese aid information by cataloguing the materials published by each Chinese government entity involved with foreign aid. In April 2011, the State Council, China’s highest executive body, published China’s Foreign Aid, an official white paper that provides aggregate figures on China’s foreign aid as well as data on aid distribution by industry, region, and level of income. However, the white paper does not disclose records for individual recipient countries or projects. Other data on grants and interest-free loans are available through The China Statistical Yearbook (Almanac of China’ s Foreign Economic Relations and Trade; 中国对外经济贸易年间), and China Eximbank annual reports are accessible on the Eximbank’s website. But neither of these contain country-level data. Patchy information is available through press releases, policy speeches and news reports, but as Grimm and his colleagues point out, such sources are only small pieces of China’s intricate aid puzzle. Moreover, no data are publicly available about success rates for any of China’s aid projects, and there are few if any project evaluations, audits and assessments in the public domain. It is therefore not entirely surprising that Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Fu Ziying recently reported, “China has not found a single case of corruption in its aid projects to foreign countries during the past six decades.”