Marking up

Development Initiatives have announced an ambitious and exciting project called 'aidinfo' which seeks to make aid information more transparent and accessible to the world:

People in rich countries will be able to find out more quickly exactly where and how their money has been spent – and the impact it has had. They will be able to find out what people think of the services. They will be able to hold their own governments to account for whether aid money has been well used. And if they see that aid is spent wisely, they may be willing to provide more in future.

Their memorandum to the Commons Committee on Co-ordination for Aid Effectiveness, suggests the standard may be based on the International Development Markup Language.

A word of advice to DI: concentrate more on the political hurdles than the technical ones. There is widespread and entrenched resistance to transparency.