The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation has launched its first transparency policy, which comes with a commitment to share as much information as possible about what it and its partners are learning.

CIFF says that the policy is “part of a global effort in the development sector to make more information widely accessible to inform strategies, plan interventions and manage resources effectively”.

All documents, including data, that all of its grantees and consultants produce. These include final versions of presentations, reports and datasets, although grantee’s administrative reports are excluded from this. Other documents that contain commercially sensitive information will also be excluded.

CIFF has said that complying with the policy may entail additional costs, and that it will work with grantees to support these.

CIFF said that “providing access to research plans and research data permits healthy scrutiny of evidence, reduces duplication of effort, and enables secondary uses of data, which improves efficiency of resourcing”.

In a statement on its website, the charity said: “We aim to make as much content as possible freely available through open licensing, such as a Creative Commons license. This includes development work, research and data funded by CIFF. For instance, CIFF-funded peer-reviewed research articles which would have gone behind a publication's pay-wall will now be freely available.

“Opening the global knowledge bank will help speed up the transformational change required for every child to survive and thrive, today and in the future.”

It has also committed to joining the International Aid Transparency Initiative, a voluntary initiative that seeks to improve the transparency of aid, development, and humanitarian resources in order to increase their effectiveness in tackling poverty.

CIFF’s transparency policy, and more information on its implementation, is available here.