The 2022 Australian aid transparency audit

By Terence Wood and Huiyuan Liu

September 2022

This report covers the 2022 Australian Aid Transparency Audit run by the Development Policy Centre. The Centre audits Australian Aid Program transparency every three years – previous audits were run in 2013, 2016 and 2019. In 2022, we continued the practice used in previous audits and assessed the Aid Program’s transparency about the projects it funds. This included auditing whether the Aid Program lists all of the projects it funds, whether it provides basic information about these projects and whether it makes detailed documentation available covering the full aid project cycle. We also expanded our analysis to assess the availability of high-level aid budget information. Despite some improvements in reporting, the overall findings of the 2022 Aid Audit are worrying: transparency in 2022 was clearly worse than in any other year we have audited. The challenges provided by the COVID-19 pandemic may have contributed to this deterioration. Nevertheless, there is a clear challenge confronting the Aid Program at this point in time: to ensure that transparency stops deteriorating and improves significantly in coming years.

Wood, T. & Liu. H., 2022, ‘The 2022 Australian aid transparency audit’, Report, Development Policy Centre, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.

Karen Downing

Karen Downing is Research Communications Coordinator at the Development Policy Centre.