Money fuels politics. But when it flows in the shadows, democracy is the first casualty. Across most of Africa, and much of the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, citizens are expected to vote without knowing who pays for the campaigns competing for their support.
New research by Transparency International finds that only about one in four countries across these regions publishes any political finance data online – and many of those that do hide it in formats that are nearly impossible to analyse. Broken down further, that’s one in two countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, one in three in Asia and the Pacific, and just one in twenty-five in Africa. The result is weak oversight, distorted competition and a growing trust gap between citizens and those who seek to govern them.
Fortunately, the picture is not uniformly bleak. A handful of trailblazers – including Australia, Costa Rica, South Africa – are building digital systems that let journalists, watchdogs and voters follow the money across parties, candidates and election cycles. Others are taking first steps by scanning and uploading the financial reports they receive, proving that transparency is possible even in low tech environments. And where states lag, civil society is stepping in with shadow reporting and public interest tools that link money in politics to real world corruption harms.
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Still, almost every country highlighted in this research has already ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption – which commits states to transparency in the funding of political parties and election campaigns – making the absence of meaningful disclosure in several countries not just a governance failure, but a breach of the very commitments governments have made on the global stage. Restoring sunlight to political finance is not just a matter of compliance – it’s a test of democratic integrity.
This December’s Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption in Doha will give governments a chance to prove that their commitments are real, as they consider a landmark resolution on transparency in political finance.
What the data show shows
Transparency International’s review of 117 countries across Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean confirms a stark reality: most do not publish party or campaign finance online. Only a quarter of all countries studied – 29 in total – publish any political finance data online. Where data exists, half the time it is locked away in scanned PDFs and static tables that can neither be searched nor linked to other public records such as procurement, tax, registry or asset declarations. In Latin America, around 45 per cent of countries disclose some information online – but half of them rely on clunky, inaccessible formats.
Availability of campaign finance data on oversight institution’s website
More than half of the 88 countries that publish no political finance data online are in Africa and the Caribbean. Africa presents a striking paradox: despite having one of the strongest international commitments to transparency – enshrined in the African Union’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption – only two countries in the region make political finance information available online. In other words, around 45 million registered voters in Morocco and South Africa can see how their political parties are funded, while at least 500 million voters elsewhere on the continent cannot.
Online information about campaign finance donors
When these regional findings are aggregated with Europe, the global picture is even clearer. Combining our results with International IDEA’s 2023 European survey shows that out of 157 countries jointly covered, public oversight institutions in 102 – or 65 per cent – do not publish campaign donation reports online at all.
The Electoral Integrity Project adds further context. A study of 643 elections in 169 countries between 2012 and 2024 found that campaign finance remains the weakest area of election integrity worldwide. That status quo is untenable in an era when corruption networks leverage dark money, disinformation and opaque third-party spending to bend policy in private interests. Publishing who gives and where the money goes is a basic condition for fair competition and informed choice.
Read the full working paper: Digital disclosure of political finance in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
How digital disclosure turns transparency into accountability
Digital disclosure is not a buzzword; it is what turns paper-based formalities into usable public accountability. If citizens must travel and pay a fee to inspect donor lists, transparency becomes burdensome rather than enabling. Scanned PDFs improve access, but they do not permit trend analysis, cross-checking against public contracts, or rapid verification during campaigns. Searchable databases and downloadable CSVs do. They allow journalists to test whether the company bankrolling a candidate later won public tenders, let researchers identify patterns in small, repeated donations or in-kind support, and help regulators spot breaches faster by automating checks for missing data, duplicate entries, or prohibited donors.
The design of these systems matters. Publishing data in a single, central portal with consistent templates and clear documentation makes it possible for citizens to use it – and for oversight agencies to sustain it. Connecting political finance data with other public sources multiplies its value, turning raw numbers into red flags that trigger investigations.
Where digital accountability is emerging and gaining ground
Despite the overall scarcity of digital disclosure, several countries are proving that progress is possible. From incremental upgrades to fully searchable databases, countries are showing that when political finance data is published in usable formats, citizens and oversight bodies gain real tools to follow the money.
Australia has long provided a model for digital disclosure through the Australian Electoral Commission’s Transparency Register, which allows users to search across annual and election returns and download bulk data. However, early in 2025, Australia’s federal parliament took an important but still insufficient step towards integrity in political funding. It enhanced the transparency of political donations by lowering disclosure thresholds from AU$16,900 to AU$5,000 and mandating real-time publication, but nonetheless introduced donation and expenditure caps that risk entrenching the major political parties and still do not go far enough to stop big money influencing politics. For example, a wealthy individual or major industry – such as big tech, gambling, or fossil fuels – can still donate up to AU$50,000 to each party or candidate per state or territory, allowing contributions of up to AU$450,000 per year.
Meanwhile, Costa Rica shows the power of publishing in bulk. All donations to political parties from 2006 to 2024 sit in a single spreadsheet with nearly 100,000 records, allowing users to trace donors across years and parties. Summary graphics for the 2022 presidential race help non-experts make sense of complex flows. Brazil goes further still, with search-by-donor and search-by-supplier features, and combined, machine-readable data covering both party and candidate accounts. Chile provides combined election files dating back two decades, enabling long-run comparisons.
In South Africa, the Electoral Commission’s online portal provides quarterly donation disclosures in machine-readable formats and identifies donors by name – a rare practice on the continent. While there is room to add true cross-report search functionality, the system represents a step change from opaque past practices.
Where states fall short, civic ingenuity fills the gap
In several countries, citizens and civil society are building their own workarounds. In Sri Lanka, new legal duties under the Regulation of Election Expenditure Act require parties and candidates to report donor identities and amounts. Enforcement is stiffening, with proceedings initiated against non-compliant candidates and the Election Commission piloting digitised reporting at the subnational level. Alongside this, civic tech is playing an increasingly important role. Transparency International Sri Lanka’s public-interest platforms – including ApeSalli.lk, which channels citizen reports of bribery and political spending abuses, and the GAP Tracker, which monitors the delivery of reform milestones – have created a feedback loop between voters, regulators, and reformers.
However, Sri Lanka captures both the promise and the pitfalls of progress. The legal framework now recognises that citizens deserve to know who pays for politics, and the election authority is experimenting with digital submissions. Enforcement is no longer a paper tiger; non-filers face consequences. However, online publication is not yet a reality, and too much information still lives in forms the public cannot easily interrogate. As an intermediate step, civic actors could play a pivotal role by getting their hands on paper reports and electronic files, turning them into dashboards that map bribery patterns, spending abuses and reform milestones – widening the flow of information to regulators and watchdogs. The lesson is replicable across the region: pilot, publish, iterate – and invite citizens in.
The region is seeing similar momentum elsewhere. The General Election Commission of Mongolia is developing an online system to automate the collection and publication of parties’ financial reports, taking into account the views of political parties and civic monitors. Transparency International chapters in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islandshave been pushing election-integrity reforms and citizen engagement, while civic education and monitoring drives in Nepal and youth-led integrity programmes in Indonesia are tightening the links between political money and public accountability. The throughline is clear: when voters can see how politics is financed and can act on red flags, corruption loses its oxygen.
Courts can help too. Malawi shows that civil society can play a constructive role in enforcing legislation. A 2018 law mandated the creation of the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties to oversee transparency in political funding, yet it remained unimplemented. In July 2022, the Malawi Law Society brought a case against the Office of the Registrar General (on behalf of the unestablished Registrar of Political Parties) for failing to disclose political finance information. In March 2025, the court deemed the omission “unconstitutional, unlawful and unreasonable” and directed the state to comply. Although the ruling did not set a timeline, it affirmed citizens’ right to know and prompted the government to commit to establishing the office, collecting reports and publishing them online.
Troubling gaps and backsliding
Unfortunately, in many of the countries examined, transparency is almost non-existent. In Madagascar, there is virtually no online information about who bankrolls parties or candidates. Neither parties nor candidates are required to disclose their sources of funding, and no campaign finance data are publicly accessible. With no expenditure caps, no donor disclosure, and no law guaranteeing citizens access to public information, oversight is severely constrained. These gaps reinforce structural imbalances – from state resources favouring incumbents to systemic barriers limiting women’s participation. Reliance on opaque political networks continues to shape competition, leaving voters without a clear picture of who finances their representatives.
Zambia faces similar opacity. Political party financing remains weakly regulated and largely hidden from view, with limited disclosure and accountability mechanisms in place. Three-quarters of parties have been found to have very low accountability, with only a minority keeping proper records or operating bank accounts. More than half have no financial management systems in place, and nearly two-thirds accept anonymous donations – creating high risks of illicit financing.
A recent study by Transparency International Zambia also revealed stark inequalities in campaign spending, with male, wealthier, and urban candidates vastly outspending others. The Zambia Cost of Politics Survey, based on a sample of 206 of the 682 candidates who contested the 156 parliamentary seats in the 2021 election, estimates that each spent an average of ZMW 478,000 (US$26,300) during the general election campaign (excluding the selection process). In other words, it is plausible that the origin of around US$18 million went undisclosed to the seven million Zambians registered to vote in 2021. With so little transparency about who bankrolls politics, Zambia faces rising risks of vote-buying, foreign interference, and state capture in the run-up to its 2026 elections. Transparency International has recommended to the President of Zambia that his government introduce to Parliament the long-awaited Political Parties Bill that could shine a light on money in politics ahead of the 2026 elections.
Elsewhere, systems exist but are hobbled by design choices. Panama publishes copious PDFs that are neither searchable nor in open data formats – making the information difficult to access or analyse across parties or election cycles.. Uruguaysplits files by candidate, frustrating attempts to follow a donor across the field. India, whose Supreme Court meritoriously put an end in 2024 to the unconstitutional Electoral Bonds scheme that hid the sources of unlimited corporate donations to political parties, puts enormous volumes of data online, including donors’ names and addresses, but in scanned formats that deter analysis – a missed opportunity for one of the world’s largest democracies. Japan, meanwhile, publishes out-of-date, non-searchable reports that make tracking donors across contests all but impossible.
Peru and Bolivia offer a cautionary tale for the Americas. Both have partial disclosure systems that suggest progress on paper but fail in practice. In Peru, a new mechanism for large ‘confidential’ donations routed through a state bank masks donor identities from both recipients and the public – effectively re-creating the opacity that fuels influence-trading.
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In Bolivia, audit reports replace the original submissions, depriving voters and watchdogs of the source material needed to trace money and verify claims. Both countries need to reverse course. In Bolivia, for example, publishing the original reports or converting the information into searchable databases could enable voters to hold their newly elected representatives to account. Reviving and modernising Peru’s once-promising donor transparency and search tools could help deter dirty money from illicit interests linked to organised crime ahead of the 2026 election campaign.
What can the Session of the Conference of the States Parties do?
This December in Doha, the 11th United Nations Conference of the States Parties will take place – the official global gathering of governments that have ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption, the world’s only legally binding treaty on corruption. Governments will negotiate and adopt international resolutions that shape global anti-corruption standards.
For the first time, States Parties will consider a resolution focused specifically on transparency in political finance. Led by Norway, Albania, Ghana and Mongolia, this groundbreaking proposal would establish the most comprehensive set of universal commitments for how political money should be disclosed and overseen.
This is long overdue – and it matters now more than ever. Around the world, dark money is flowing across borders, funding disinformation and buying influence. Adopting a resolution to set new global standards for integrity in political financing is a once-in-a-generation opportunity: it could accelerate reforms and unlock much-needed technical assistance for election commissions and oversight agencies, helping to ensure that voters have the right to know who pays for the campaigns competing for their support.
It is vital that governments back this resolution – not just with words, but with real commitments to transparency and enforcement.
Making transparency count
The path forward is clear. Countries that already publish usable political finance data show that transparency is not a luxury – it is achievable with modest resources and sound design. Oversight bodies should publish everything they receive, standardise templates and centralise publication in one portal. Reports should be machine-readable, searchable, and linked to other public records such as company and procurement data so potential conflicts of interest can be flagged automatically. Alongside the full datasets, concise summaries and visual explainers can help non-specialists make sense of the information.
Examples from around the world prove this is possible. Costa Rica’s single spreadsheet covering nearly two decades of donations, South Africa’s quarterly releases identifying donors by name, Australia’s searchable archives and Brazil’s donor-tracking tools all show how usability turns disclosure into real accountability.
Political finance transparency is not an optional extra. Money without sunlight corrodes everything it touches – from candidate selection to contract awards. The steps toward digital disclosure are well understood, the costs modest, the tools available, and the benefits profound. It is time for all governments to make political money visible – and keep it that way.
