AidData
Personally, I am a "true believer" of the merits and beauty of aid transparency. But often people ask me, what all this standardised, open data can be used for. In the following guest blog, Mike Tierney, director of the international relations program at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and a principal investigator for the AidData initiative, gives one example of how data can help to analyse USA aid allocation in recent years. Read more »
Responding to long-held concerns about uncoordinated donor behavior, the Paris Declaration of 2005 made harmonization one of its five pillars, pledging to work towards “eliminating duplication of efforts and rationalising donor activities to make them as cost-effective as possible.” Among the problems of uncoordinated action are elevated transaction costs as recipient governments struggle to comply with variegated donor rules and procedures (Knack and Rahman 2007) and decreased donor specialization as “all donors seem to want to give to all sectors in all countries” (Easterly 2007). All of the attention given to coordination problems begs the questions: how much do donors coordinate their activities? And is coordination effectively targeting needs within a country – both spatially (aid to villages or provinces) and sectorally (aid for different purposes)?
A couple of days ago the general availability of aid information improved considerably. AidData is online! On March 23rd the switch was flipped and the beta version of a database with projects from development cooperation since 1945 is now publicly available. While the database is not comprehensive, it captures a large part of all development projects, particularly from recent years. The AidData database allows to search for countries, donors and sectors, it provides overall budgets as well as additional descriptive projects information and in some cases project documents. Read more »