Both critics and supporters of foreign aid often woefully deplore the lack of transparency in aid financing because it impedes incentives to use funding appropriately in the first place. The premise of AidData, a new project launched this week, is to avoid just that by increasing the visibility of information on development finance.
It’s an exciting advent that aims to be “an easy-to-use, comprehensive, and timely resource describing the universe of development finance project-by-project, including all grants and loans committed by all major bilateral and multilateral aid donors.”
It is in fact a scaled-up combination of the Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA) project from Development Gateway and Project Level Aid (PLAID) backed by researchers from William and Mary, Brigham Young, and Brown. The AidData team members themselves are a group of academics and professionals from the development field.
What makes it better than the previous projects? AidData promotes itself as a “portal to information,” more than simply a database—not only can users access data but they can utilize various visualization tools to create maps and graphs. Additionally, the site accounts for approximately one million detailed aid initiatives from 1945 to 2009 and aggregates a larger swath of donor countries than any previous platform.
Although it currently employs only the funding that originated from governments, the project is planning to include private flows as it continues expanding the data. The AidData team will be blogging on development financing and hopes that the open-source data paves the way for increased transparency, improved aid effectiveness, and constructive feedback in the future.
Definitely check it out!
Sounds like a great initiative, I will definitely check it out!
That’s really useful. Aid sceptics often don’t realise that aid supporters are really concerned with transparency - it’s key if we’re to know that aid reaches the people it’s intended to reach!
The PLAID project includes researchers from BYU, William and Mary, and Brown University. Thanks for the shout out.
@Daniel: Fantastic—Let us know what you find!
@Ian: Absolutely, and this will be a great step toward improving that.
@Mike: Just added W&M and Brown to make sure credit goes where credit is due. Thanks for pointing that out and for creating such a great resource!
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We looked at it - and will focus on it - in next steps of Technology for Transparency network, as there is great potential and need for Aid transparency - and this globally.