Hacking Aid: new technology and its impacts on aid (a report from aidinfo)

In July, representatives from international donor agencies, development country Governments and civil society organisations met in Paris to talk data. As topics go, it might not be the most riveting, especially among a group of interlocutors more used to discussing life-and-death issues that affect the poorest parts of the world. But agreed standards of data could be the tiny key which unlocks a very large gate on the path to more efficient, more effective aid.

International aid has come a long way since the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1943. According to Roger Riddle, author of Does foreign aid really work?, today over 200 agencies officially provide overseas development assistance to over 150 countries. Nearly every government in the world either gives or receives aid, and the flow of official aid in 2008 was ten times the figure of ten years ago, at around $120 billion.

And yet the effectiveness of aid is increasingly being brought into question. Those global citizens lucky enough to find themselves living in countries who are net exporters of aid tend to regard the activity with increasing scepticism. Witness the refusal of most of the UK population (apart from Bob Geldof, of course) to be too surprised by allegations earlier this year that money raised for starving children in Ethiopia by BandAid in the eighties was diverted and used to buy weapons. Correspondingly, dissenting voices who claim to represent aid-dependent countries – voices such as that of Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa – are gaining ever greater audiences at home and abroad.

One place where both aid evangelists and aid dissenters can agree, however, is on the pressing need for the interwoven systems of overseas development assistance to be more transparent. After all, how can we truly debate the effectiveness of aid, if we don’t really know who’s giving what to whom and what’s happening next? Yet, more than any other, the aid debate lacks a clear picture of current practices and their outcomes to inform it, and for a number of reasons. International development agencies tend only to tell the public of aid’s successes– external pressures mean that the evaluation of aid effectiveness that has been commonplace since the 1980s is still guarded inside the agencies in question, and rarely published. Meanwhile the recipients of aid, the citizens of the more than 150 countries who routinely receive overseas development assistance, remain voiceless, unable to tell agencies and the taxpayers who fund them what’s working and what isn’t. Aid’s intermediaries – the governments and NGOs involved in the throughput of aid – are also under a number of complex pressures.

Against such a backdrop, July's Paris convening of development agencies by IATI – the International Aid Transparency Initiative – hopes to have made a breakthrough. At the meeting, agencies agreed to publish their aid data in a proactive manner, and to do so against an approved data schema that includes standards around describing key information concerning the what, where, how and when aid money is being targeted. This data will be published in open formats, and will be free for anyone to report and reuse. Although the substance of the agreement may seem technical, even dry, the promise it holds could turn the aid debate inside out and ultimately put real power in the hands of citizens across the globe.

One of the organisations that has been working towards this agreement is aidinfo. Their enthusiasm and dedication to this outcome has taken a cue from the radical changes to the public sphere that have taken place over the past decade thanks to the rise of new, disintermediated, communications platforms. These platforms – chiefly the worldwide web, but also mobile and SMS – dramatically lower the barriers to entry for anyone wishing to communicate with the world, granting access to audience numbers previously only reachable by mainstream broadcast and print media.

This means that highly motivated individuals with a modicum of software expertise – people who have come to be known in geek circles as “civic hackers” – can now truly be the change they want to see, building tools and services that effect real democratic change (for example, mySociety’s simple Freedom of Information platform WhatDoTheyKnow.com). Meanwhile citizens more generally can participate in data-gathering and reporting projects that, aggregated across a nation, present a clear picture of a situation that would be unobtainable by any single institution (for example, the Ushahidi mobile reporting platform, which originated in Kenya during civil unrest following the elections in 2007, but which has since been deployed to help relief efforts in Haiti, and to monitor elections in Ethiopia).

As has been realised by the Obama administration – and indeed, the former UK government led by Gordon Brown – the institutions that take advantage of these new developments best are the ones that respond by providing their official data in raw, reusable formats. Since the launch of data.gov and data.gov.uk in 2009 and 2010 respectively, citizens, civil society groups – even commercial companies – have all stepped up to the plate, re-appropriating official data to produce everything from services that search for approved residential care facilities (in the UK) to intricate water quality maps (in the US).

One data “mashup” that should quicken the pulse of anyone interested in aid transparency is that produced by James Michaelis, a PhD student from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, that combines data released by USAID and DFID under the data.gov and data.gov.uk schemes on a simple, clickable map. The tool sounds simple, but the effect is powerful, allowing anyone to see at-a-glance who in the special relationship contributes the most to whom (see http://data-gov.tw.rpi.edu/demo/linked/aidviz-1554-1 - some answers may surprise you!)

It is developments like these that aidinfo – as well as the various partners signed up to IATI’s agreement – focus on along the long journey towards meaningful, digital, aid transparency. The proliferation of agencies involved, each working to different practices, standards and timeframes, means that releasing compatible data, data that could be “mashed” to present meaningful visualisations of aid flows and concurrent outcomes, is a feat of an altogether different magnitude than releasing the datasets produced by any one government. Congratulations should be offered to each agency that signed up to the IATI standards this week, and those who have not signed should be further encouraged to do so.

The opportunity this new way of working holds for aid transparency and aid effectiveness is unique and considerable. Imagine this; there are 10,000 water points in Tanzania, each with a unique serial number.  Whenever someone goes to a water point and finds it is broken, they can send a text message. A Tanzanian NGO receives the text messages and tracks which water points are well maintained. They organise the information by district, and publish league tables of effectiveness. The local NGO accesses information published under IATI to discover who constructed and funded the water points. Many were provided by Oxfam: they work well. But the water points provided by an Italian NGO are twice as likely to break down. The Italian NGO comes under pressure in Italy to build water points to better standards.

This is just one of the scenarios aidinfo have developed to show how better information can effect real change (several have been published, in a more expanded paper Technical Innovation: The Opportunities for Increasing Transparency and Accessibility of Aid Data available to download at http://www.aidinfo.org/content/technical-innovations-report). By harnessing the power of the disintermediated public sphere, aid agencies can close the feedback loop between recipients and donors, introducing not only real data into the debate, but the possibilities of serious efficiency gains. IATI’s new standards have taken us one step closer to this future.