OREANDA-NEWS. April 19, 2016. Publish What You Fund, a British-based think tank, has ranked the African Development Bank in its highest category on transparency. For the third consecutive year, AfDB is listed among the top 10 organisations that are the most open and transparent. The think tank’s league table assesses the transparency of 46 top-ten development organisations including the World Bank, UNDP, IADB and AsDB.

Publishing data according to IATI’s international standards on transparency, makes information about development spending easier to access, use and understand.

“AfDB is totally committed to transparency—And this achievement crowns three year’s hard work on data disclosure: It is excellent news for our institution and its stakeholders” said the Quality Assurance and Results Department Director, Simon Mizrahi. “It should not, however, be an excuse for complacency: Delivering on the Bank’s High-5s remains our priority and will require stepping up the pace of work including on transparency”, he added.

IATI is a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to increase the transparency of development cooperation and consequently improve its effectiveness in tackling poverty.

At the centre of IATI is a data standard. This is a format and framework for publishing data on development cooperation activities, intended to be used by all organisations engaged in development, from government donors to private sector organisations, and national and international NGOs. It was designed in close consultation with key users of development cooperation data in developing countries, to ensure its  relevance and utility for a variety of different data users.

The Bank is a signatory to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) since April 2011. In December 2012, AfDB released its initial implementation schedule for the IATI standard, which outlines how and when the Bank plans to release more information as part of its commitment to IATI