The SDG Communicator

Common wisdom says that more transparency means more trust. Since the early 2000s, initiatives like the Aid Transparency Index (ATI) have encouraged development agencies to disclose more information about whom and what they fund.

But transparency can also carry risks. Development agencies want to be open and accountable, but also worry about misinformation and critical scrutiny. Enthusiasm for transparency appears to be waning. After a seeming cancellation, Publish What You Fund was able to publish the 2026 ATI only by changing its funding model to a paid subscription.

So how can development communicators navigate this dilemma? Below are 5 takeaways from our research, including the Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset (see box) and multiple survey experiments with citizens and Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom.

The Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset (CATD)

How transparent are aid agencies towards citizens? The Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset (CATD) includes data on 212 official aid agencies across 37 donor countries, covering all entities listed in the OECD/DAC repository that are eligible to spend Official Development Assistance (ODA).

While other indices mainly focus on how donors report to international bodies like the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), CATD only codes what information citizens can access via the agency’s main website. CATD is thus the first and only index that helps agencies assess their transparency directly toward the public.

1. Development agencies need to communicate with citizens, not just policy-making elites

Since development is a “low-salience” issue for most citizens, aid agencies tend to prioritize communicating with policy-making elites. Existing transparency indices like the ATI are well-suited for this purpose.

However, in today’s increasingly politicized world, and with competing demands on public funds, development agencies must communicate with citizens, or risk losing taxpayer support. Citizens need to know what they are doing and why.

Strikingly, we find that aid agencies that are transparent to international audiences (i.e. that perform well on indices like the ATI) do not necessarily perform well on the indicators in our Citizen Aid Transparency Database (CATD), which measures whether information is transparent and easily accessible for domestic audiences.

2. People are more likely to support development agencies that are transparent.

Does transparency increase public support for aid among citizens? To answer this question, we carried out a survey experiment with over 2,000 people in the UK in 2022. We provided respondents with different examples of how an organisation—in this case the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)—was changing its approach.

We found that people who learn that an agency is transparent (i.e. that it has a transparency portal and makes information accessible) are more likely to support that agency. Across the survey sample, support for aid through FCDO increased from 4.95 to 5.54 (on a scale from 1 to 10) in the treated group.

Indeed, enhancing transparency was a better way to increase support than other possible reforms, like (re)focusing aid on the poorest countries, the national interest, or global public goods, enhancing donor coordination, or reforming anti-corruption guidance.

We found that learning about transparency had a particularly positive impact on the attitudes of sceptics. Support went up by 1.01 index points for people that did not support aid, and by 0.87 index points for people that did not trust the civil service.

We also found that all kinds of transparency had positive effects, including transparency on decision-making procedures, governance structures, overall spending and overhead costs, staff numbers, and detailed information on each project.

3. Public support for aid is shallow but malleable.

These first surveys presented citizens with neutral information about aid transparency. But what happens when citizens are exposed to negative information, for example that funds were embezzled?

In 2024, we surveyed a different sample of UK citizens, and 117 UK Members of Parliament. As in the first experiment, we informed respondents about transparency, but added that this transparency may reveal “information on corruption, fraud, and mismanagement.” The addition of this sentence tempered public support for the agency by about 0.47 points on the 1 to 10 scale—roughly the same as the positive effect of emphasizing transparency.  

We also presented respondents with a scenario of a scandal involving aid money—the embezzlement of aid funds in Tanzania in 2016.  Exposure to this aid scandal significantly reduced public support for aid. The effect was large, equivalent to about 1.1 points on a 1 to 10 scale. We saw a decline in support for aid, not just to Tanzania but also to other developing countries not implicated in the scandal.

4. Suspending aid doesn’t reassure citizens who have heard negative information about aid.

In our experiment, we also examined whether decisive actions by the donor can mitigate negative public responses. In our Tanzanian scenario, the UK reaffirmed its “zero-tolerance approach” to corruption and suspended all direct aid to the country in response to the incident. Being informed of this suspension did not reassure respondents in the experiment.

In fact, after hearing about the suspensions, respondents felt somewhat more inclined to cut aid to Tanzania. Moreover, it did not change their views about aid to other developing countries. This suggests that, instead of focusing on aid cuts in their crisis communication, agencies could consider highlighting how their governance systems prevent aid misuse.

5. Politicians are very good at predicting how citizens will respond to aid scandals

Finally, when we asked parliamentarians to predict how citizens would respond to different aid scandals, UK MPs proved to be remarkably astute. As Figure 1 shows, in our surveys, UK parliamentarians were able to predict with remarkable how citizens would respond to particular kinds of aid scandal.

Given that parliamentarians know what does and doesn’t resonate with their constituents, supportive MPs may be excellent allies for development communicators. They may be excellently placed to guide and make explanations about the use of aid and the consequence of aid scandals.

Figure 1: Decline in aid support among citizens and related UK MP beliefs following different aid scandals

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Cumulatively, our results suggest several reasons for development communicators to be concerned about sharing negative information on aid. However, we believe it would be misguided to interpret this as a reason to withhold information. Instead, we believe policymakers should proactively share what they do and how transparent they are as an agency.

Why? Our research tells us that public opinion on aid is malleable. Citizens respond to both positive and negative information about aid, because they often know very little about aid. Countering this means educating the public about what aid agencies actually do, even (and perhaps especially) in the wake of strong pushback against foreign aid.