before the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. We were proud of this feat, as well as the opportunity to role model NGO transparency at an international level. Despite this public victory, it became apparent that EWB had more work to do to institutionalize transparency, and IATI-compliance, as a core tenant of our operating style. Knowing our existing information management systems were inconsistent and often ad-hoc, a lot had to be done to ensure we’d be able to publish data regularly - a defining element of “open data”. Our failure thus far is clear: we haven’t created a sustainable process to manage information and regularly publish to the IATI registry. We failed to establish a longterm process; instead continued to rely on the spontaneous efforts of our volunteers and staff. While IATI is meant to improve aid effectiveness by making more and better information available, this is only
EWB truly values openness and deeply understands the merits of transparency – yet, despite the publication of this failure report and a committed culture of learning, we’ve failed to build strong information management systems. We have failed to invest enough resources to integrate these systems at EWB. As our work grows in scale and complexity, it will become more urgent to mature and place greater emphasis on building knowledge management systems. Moving forward, it’s paramount that we build a process to consistently publish to the IATI standard. As Water for People CEO Ned Breslin notes, “let’s not stop there – let’s actually push to answer the effectiveness question as well, and insist that we not only track where the money goes, but also whether it truly transformed lives – and do all this transparently.” F
To both influence other actors in the development sphere to become compliant, and to “walk the walk” in our advocacy efforts with the Government, the need for the improvement of our own transparency became clear. possible when quality information is published consistently – which we have not set ourselves up to do. Our operational culture draws heavily on the resilience of our people, rather than that of our internal processes. While our commitment to transparency is genuine, our efforts have been sporadic, short-sighted, and poorly managed.
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