An old black-and-white photograph taken in 1944 at the conference in Bretton Woods that gave birth to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows men in grey suits meeting to design the future multilateral system. Fast-forward 67 years to a community a few kilometres west of the capital of Tanzania, where local residents are using GPS devices to collect public data on the delivery of local services – schools, health clinics, public toilets and rubbish dumps – so the information can be uploaded to an online data map, ultimately holding their government accountable.
As government ministers, international aid organisations, non-government organisations, foundations and others gather in Busan, South Korea, for the fourth high-level forum on aid effectiveness to discuss the future of aid co-ordination, one thing is clear: the development future doesn't lie with men in dark suits behind closed doors. Not only are developing countries now providing two-thirds of global growth, turning the old north-south aid paradigm on its head, but it is becoming clearer that effective development needs the participation not just of governments but of beneficiaries, local communities and citizens more broadly. And with 21st-century technology, we now have the means to make it happen.
It was the use of the internet – an interactive platform called checkmyschool.org – that saw an elementary school principal in Leyte province in the Philippines get much-needed building work to resume at her school, damaged by a natural disaster. The principal went online and lodged a complaint about the delay, fearing corrupt procurement practices were responsible. Her complaint prompted a speedy response. The work was completed and 800 students were given a new school roof.
It was via SMS messages from cellphones that citizens in the conflict-affected province of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were able to vote for local budget priorities, to break a vicious cycle of mistrust and poorly performing services. As a result, for the first time in decades, local budgets started to include investments in local communities providing basic services to the poor, and in response, citizens started to pay taxes.
These moves to transparency – giving citizens access to information – gives 21st-century meaning to the saying "knowledge is power".
And the power of knowledge can spread even further: transparency breeds accountability and a focus on results – for the taxpayer a sense that aid monies are being used wisely, for the citizen a sense that government is doing the right thing. The tranparency spotlight has already been on donors. The UK-based coalition of civil society organisations working on governance, aid effectiveness, and access to information, Publish What You Fund, has just released its aid transparency indexrating 58 international and bilateral donors and ranking the World Bank as most transparent. But before we become too self-congratulory, let's recall its overall message: some donors do well, all donors can do better.
Perhaps we can take some heart from another study on aid quality released this month, as a nudge to Busan. The Centre for Global Development and the Brookings Institution found the World Bank's fund for the poorest, theInternational Development Association, the UK and Ireland all scored in the top 10. And the study found, because of greater commitments to transparency, the area in which donors make the most improvement was in transparency and learning.
We've all learned that there's no one size fits all answer to development. As the Busan gathering will illustrate, no one has a monopoly on development. We're seeing the lessons learned in the developing world transcend borders – Rwanda was inspired by China's successful move to terrace-degraded hillsides; Colombia's model for mass transit has been copied widely; and India's model for information communication technologies is being studied across the African continent.
Truly democratising development means seizing all the opportunities offered by information communication technologies. It was a prime motivation behind the World Bank's move more than a year ago to open up its data banks. New web-based and mobile tools make it easier for the public to find, use and download bank data in five languages. Rich or poor, from the developed or the developing world, people have the tools to play a role in devising development solutions.
Developing countries, too, are seeing value in opening up their data. Kenya this year became the first country on the African continent to launch a national open data initiative. It took just three weeks. Now it's possible for anyone to obtain census or budget data, check on spending at the county level or even find a nearby health facility. Moldova has done the same. Other nations such as Mongolia, Nigeria and Rwanda want to follow suit.
Transparency isn't just about following the money trail from the top down. An equally important part of the equation is looking at the delivery of aid from the ground up – examining ways to provide citizens not only the knowledge about what's being delivered by development dollars but also the means to act upon that knowledge to help find and monitor development solutions.
And there's a double-win. Transparency and citizen involvement are not only a check on corruption, they can also be mobilised to improve development outcomes. Take Uganda where health workers at 50 health centres across the country were inspired to work harder after community monitoring – via citizen score cards. The result: a 33% drop in child mortality in the centres.
A key lesson of the Arab spring was that citizens' voice must be an integral part of development. It's a lesson we should heed. Investments that give voice to people are just as vital as money. Information and participation are as valuable as dollars if we want development assistance to be truly effective.
• Caroline Anstey is managing director of the World Bank