How transparent are aid agencies to their citizens? Introducing the Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset

Abstract

Existing measures of aid transparency overwhelmingly focus on how much information donor agencies are willing to share with the international donor community, overlooking that transparency is about increasing citizens' access to information in order to improve government accountability. In this article, we present the Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset (CATD). Using factor and correlation analysis, we show that the CATD captures a different dimension of transparency than existing transparency measures. We also show that aid agency transparency varies both within and between donor countries and that there are important quality differences between agencies in the timeliness, breadth, depth and accessibility of the data provided.