Opening Aid
We recognize that the gold standard for aid transparency is fully accessible, timely and easily navigated data that is disaggregated and spatially visualized to capture refined financial, geographical, and impact information for all donors and all sectors of aid in any given country or region. Our prior work in Malawi demonstrated that many of these goals can be reached. But such aid transparency remains largely elusive due to the absence of project-level information provided directly by aid donors to the public, necessitating costly and time-consuming fieldwork. Mapping aid can and should happen: but donors' willingness to open their data is the first and most critical step to realizing this goal.
Progress is being made. Numerous donors have begun publishing project-level information (including much needed project documents) directly to their public website. As of July 2013, 150 agencies report some of their data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, 37 countries or agencies have fully signed on to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, and several are making significant strides in fully reporting to the IATI XML standard - the gold standard in terms of centralizing and harmonizing data on global development assistance.
IPD seeks to leverage both the momentum behind international aid transparency spurred by our own prior work on open aid mapping and the burgeoning supply of data from the most progressive donors now available due to the success of the global open data movement. We will not only use GIS to geomap this donor aid as it becomes available, but where robust project information exists we will mine the data to visualize and analyze aid's contributions to some of the most pressing development challenges of our times, including climate change, food security, global health and conflict. Showing that this kind of work can be done, at very low cost, is not only critical for sustaining commitment to aid transparency, but unleashing the power of big data analytics to turn that transparency into real aid accountability and effectiveness.
Progress is being made. Numerous donors have begun publishing project-level information (including much needed project documents) directly to their public website. As of July 2013, 150 agencies report some of their data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, 37 countries or agencies have fully signed on to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, and several are making significant strides in fully reporting to the IATI XML standard - the gold standard in terms of centralizing and harmonizing data on global development assistance.
IPD seeks to leverage both the momentum behind international aid transparency spurred by our own prior work on open aid mapping and the burgeoning supply of data from the most progressive donors now available due to the success of the global open data movement. We will not only use GIS to geomap this donor aid as it becomes available, but where robust project information exists we will mine the data to visualize and analyze aid's contributions to some of the most pressing development challenges of our times, including climate change, food security, global health and conflict. Showing that this kind of work can be done, at very low cost, is not only critical for sustaining commitment to aid transparency, but unleashing the power of big data analytics to turn that transparency into real aid accountability and effectiveness.
