Australia’s aid transparency architecture has changed significantly in recent years. Through AusDevPortal, renewed reporting to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and enhanced performance reporting, substantially more information is now publicly available about Australia’s development program than was the case even a few years ago. For the first time, it is becoming possible to explore parts of the aid program as a dataset rather than simply read about it through annual reports. For researchers, policymakers and taxpayers alike, this is a welcome development.
Yet after spending time exploring the architecture, I have come away with a simple conclusion. The next step in Australia’s transparency journey is not more indicators, more reports or more dashboards. It is the publication of two datasets.
The Australian development program is organised around a three-tier Performance and Delivery Framework. Tier 1 measures development outcomes and trends across the Indo-Pacific, in areas including poverty, economic growth, governance, health, gender equality, climate resilience and fragility. Tier 2 measures Australia’s contribution to development, reporting results “directly attributable to Australian development efforts”. Tier 3 measures the performance of Australia’s development investments. Introduced under the 2023 International Development Policy, the framework provides a clear architecture for understanding how aid is delivered, what it achieves and how it contributes to broader development outcomes.
The logic is intuitive: well-managed investments (Tier 3) should generate development results (Tier 2), which should contribute to improved development outcomes (Tier 1). The framework itself is not the problem. The challenge lies in the availability of the underlying data.
Tier 1 is built largely from publicly available international datasets. The indicators are drawn from sources such as the World Bank, World Health Organization, Freedom House, the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index and the World Economic Forum. The underlying data is generally accessible and well documented. However, as far as I can tell, DFAT does not publish the complete Tier 1 dataset used to generate the reported indicators. Instead, it draws on these external sources and reports selected results. Reconstructing the Tier 1 dataset is possible, but it requires querying multiple databases, harmonising country names and years and assembling the information manually. The data exists; the aggregated dataset does not.
Tier 3 appears to be the most mature part of the transparency architecture. Australia’s performance system relies on Investment Monitoring Reports (IMRs), Humanitarian Investment Monitoring Reports (HIMRs) and Final Investment Monitoring Reports (FIMRs). AusDevPortal, IATI reporting and annual performance reports now expose substantially more information about investments, financial allocations, policy markers and performance assessments than was previously available. Independent analysts have already begun extracting and visualising parts of these datasets: tools such as Scrittle demonstrate the potential of combining AusDevPortal and AusTender data to analyse the portfolio in new ways. This represents a significant improvement over earlier periods when much of the performance architecture was visible only through summary reporting, and questions about how investments are performing are becoming increasingly answerable.
Tier 2 is where things become interesting. DFAT publishes a substantial amount of information about Tier 2 results: annual reports contain aggregate indicators, technical notes explain how those indicators are calculated and case studies illustrate how results have been achieved. The technical notes reveal a sophisticated results architecture, containing detailed definitions, attribution rules, data quality standards, disaggregation requirements and reporting methodologies. These are not the characteristics of a system built around anecdotal reporting. Indeed, it is difficult to see how figures such as 165 million people reached through social protection programs, 54 countries supported to strengthen health systems, or 2.9 million people supported to improve climate adaptation and resilience, as reported in the latest Performance of Australian Development Co-operation Report, could be produced without aggregating detailed investment-level results.
The implication is that a substantial Tier 2 dataset almost certainly exists. But it does not appear to exist publicly. Instead, external users see the outputs of the system — aggregate results, technical methodologies and selected case studies — while the underlying investment-level results data is not readily available for analysis.
This matters because the current architecture makes some questions much easier to answer than others. It is increasingly possible to identify how much Australia spends, where it spends it, which investments are performing well and how overall development outcomes are changing. What is much harder to determine is which investments contributed most to reported results, which sectors generate the strongest results relative to expenditure, whether highly rated investments produce stronger results, and which delivery partners appear to perform most effectively. Answering these questions requires moving beyond published aggregates to the underlying data that generated them, and at present that is difficult.
The solution is straightforward. The first step would be to publish the full Tier 1 dataset used to generate the reported indicators. The underlying data is already public, but DFAT could dramatically improve transparency and usability by consolidating it into a single downloadable dataset. The second step would be to publish the underlying Tier 2 results dataset that sits behind the aggregate indicators. Together, these two datasets would transform the analytical value of the framework. Researchers could examine relationships between investment performance, development results and development outcomes without having to reconstruct the evidence base themselves. More importantly, they could test assumptions, identify patterns and generate insights that are currently difficult to obtain.
Australia deserves considerable credit for the progress that has been made. The transparency ecosystem is richer and more sophisticated than it was only a few years ago. The next frontier, however, is not transparency alone: it is analytical usability. DFAT has already built much of the underlying architecture. Tier 1 data exists, Tier 2 results are being collected and Tier 3 performance information is increasingly available. The missing step is to make the underlying datasets available in a form that allows others to analyse them. If Australia’s aid transparency revolution has a next chapter, it may be as simple as publishing two spreadsheets. The impact would be far greater than it sounds.
