OpenAid Public online monitoring for better development aid




Geocoding

Posted by Alena Stern

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)?

Posted by Claudia Schwegmann
If your government is receiving aid, you may want to know in detail how much money is given by the donors, for what purposes and particularly where exactly the donor-funded projects are operating. However, until now, such information is close to impossible to obtain for people not directly involved with a project. As a citizen in a development country you may be unaware of a health project in your area and you may not know the construction work on the main road is part of an aid project. This is a problem, because if people on the ground do not have information about aid projects, they cannot provide feedback about the project. Feedback, however is widely recognised as crucial to improve aid, to curb corruption, and to enhance effectiveness. One solution to this problem is geocoding - entering the exact latitude and longitude of a project into a software program that visualises the geographic position of a project on a map.