It's a cold, damp day in Kabul, but the mood is all warmth and energy inside Yama Torabi's office, with its crackling woodstove and steady flow of civil society reps, donors and government officials streaming in and out.

Torabi is the director of Integrity Watch Afghanistan (IWA), a small organisation that has succeeded in doing what few Afghan NGOs have attempted: holding the government – and the country's many donors – to account for their actions, and their spending.

Torabi, who grew up in Afghanistan, founded IWA seven years ago, while he was still working on his PhD in France.

"It came really as a reaction to the donors, who told me at the time that corruption was not an issue," Torabi says. "But I knew that corruption was an issue that needed to be approached, and that it was something urgent that [the donors] had to focus on."

IWA started off as a thinktank, but Torabi and his colleagues quickly moved into advocacy and hands-on monitoring work. "Doing research isn't going to have a lot of impact in terms of bringing changes," says Torabi, 37. Today, the organisation runs programmes that monitor the government budget, the extractive industry, and the courts. IWA has also started a community-based programme that encourages citizens to keep tabs on the aid-funded projects being implemented in their neighbourhoods.

There is plenty of aid money to track in Afghanistan, which is due to receive $16bn in foreign assistance over the next four years – and that's not counting military spending. Donors are not always interested in tracking how and where their money is spent, Torabi says, despite their good intentions.

"It's political … they have their spending imperatives," Torabi explains, adding that security concerns are also an issue. "[The donors] can't work on the street, they can't go to the provinces to check what their money is spent on."

So IWA, which occupies a modest building on a muddy street in Kabul, picks up the slack. "In the last year, we've been monitoring more than 250 projects – infrastructure projects worth more than $230m," Torabi says, noting that the challenges have been daunting at times.

"If you have 40 donors, you have to deal with 40 governments, and they all have different rules, they all have different policies, they all depend on the internal policies of their own governments," he says.

IWA's focus is on monitoring, but the organisation hasn't abandoned its policy work. Recently, IWA has been pressuring the Afghan government to adopt a freedom of information law.

"At the moment, if you want to go and ask how much time it will take for the administration to deliver your passport, they will never give you the information," Torabi says. "And if you don't have the information, you're tempted to pay a bribe in order to get it – and that is the beginning of corruption."

"India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all of these countries have passed [freedom of information] laws within the last 10 years, so we're learning from them," he says.

Clear thinking

What does transparency mean to you?

Transparency is a means of allowing people to get back their rights.

Why is access to information important in development?

Access to information empowers people, and the more you empower people, the stronger the state will be, and the better your development outcomes will be.

What is the one piece of information you most want released?

Information on beneficial ownership of companies in Afghanistan. The government should publish the names of all companies' shareholders. If an MP is making money from a mining company, then I want to know.