Open data on infrastructure projects

The Worldbank estimates, that about 1.000.000.000.000 US Dollar is lost to corruption every year! Around the world the benefit of public spending, including aid, is severely reduced by corruption. The most corrupt sector, globally, is construction. According to Charles Kenny (2009) from the Center for Global Development construction firms spend a significantly higher part of their budget to gain contracts than other companies. As Kenny describes in his new paper (2011), the result of corruption in construction projects are higher costs, long excessive completion time and particularly low quality construction. The social and economic costs of corruption in construction projects is considerable: badly repaired roads, too narrow bridges, crumbling and unsafe government buildings.

While good procurement processes and government oversight are in place to control corruption, they are apparently not sufficient. Another solution, strongly encouraged for example by the Worldbank is more transparency and accountability towards citizens. Kenny cites the example of a construction project in Indonesia where public oversight by beneficiaries savings resulted in savings between 25 and 50% of normal costs and another case in Bangladesh where community oversight reduced project costs and construction time and increased the life span of constructions. The problem with community oversight approaches is, that they themselves can be very costly. Other limits to community oversight are the suppression of citizens' voice, levels of education, access to internet and the challenge for beneficiaries to assess the complex details construction projects. Kenny proposes an alternative, that is a lot cheaper and may still yield very good results in terms of fighting corruption in the construction sector: the publication of comprehensive contract documents.  

Kenny's proposal is based on a the work undertaken by the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST), lead by DIFD and the Worldbank. CoST started in 2008 as a pilot project in eight countries and is currently being upscaled. The goal of CoST is basically to encourage the publication of a list information on each construction project including project description, purpose and location, project costs, contractors, completion dates and information updates during the cause of the project. The expected outcome of this publication is that relevant stakeholders are in a position to make informed judgements on the cost and quality of the infrastructure built and that the disclosure discourages corruption and mismanagement. 

Of course this initiative in itself is really exciting from the perspective of aid transparency, because infrastructure is an important part of aid in all sectors. It will be interesting to hear more about the program going global. What is also very exciting is that there is a striking resemblance between CoST and IATI. Both initiatives propose a multi-stakeholder agreement to publish a set of basic information about projects in order to increase accountability and effectiveness. In fact, I would even argue that the CoST information standard could very well be a subset of the IATI standard. Of course, CoST is not only limited to infrastructure projects financed by aid. But adherence of donors to the CoST standard would certainly help to encourage development country governments to consider participation in CoST. In addition, both initiatives could benefit from synergies in communicating the relevance of an information standard and encouraging the participation of more stakeholders.

Finally, it seems to me, that the value of CoST could be increased by adopting some of the specific characteristics of IATI. IATI is an open data standard, that encourages re-use through machine-readable formats and open licences. Publishing basic data about contracts available in machine-readable formats is certainly less straight-forward that financial data – but it is not impossible. It would increase the possibilities of data re-use immensely and open up the data to possible third party users. A second important characteristic of IATI is the registry. Because the IATI requires donors to publish data in open formats, all IATI data can be accessed on a single web page. There is no reason why this should not be possible with contract data.

Imagine this: IATI makes basic data about aid projects in a given locality available to whoever is interested. For all construction projects, financed by aid money or by other stakeholders, detailed contract data is available at the same website. Link it to the opencorporates website, to socio-economic data from the Worldbank, to environmental data - it would be a treasure chest for programmers, researchers and transparency activists. Of course, we all know that open data by itself is not sufficient. But I strongly believe we should seek to make the best of the information we have. CoST is a great step ahead in reducing corruption. Let's have contract data published in open re-usable formats to multiply its value!