AidData is live

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. Two initiatives in the USA have been working for a good number of years on collecting data about aid projects: the PLAID initiative by the College William and Mary and the Brigham Young University and the AiDA initiative by Development Gateway financed by the Worldbank. With painstaking effort both initiatives have been collecting data from donor websites, from the creditor reporting system of the OECD, from project documents, through letters of information request to donors and even visits to donor headquarters. PLAID and AIDA then joined forces and created AidData, which is amazingly rich, but still not comprehensive project database of the last 6 decades. Apart from projects of the traditional bilateral donors organised within the OECD, AidData provides some information on funding by the arab states, Brazil, China and by non-government donors such as foundations and NGOs. After a prolonged testphase AidData was launched on the 23 of March on an international conference on development aid information in Oxford. The objective of the creators of AidData is to provide financial and descriptive data on development projects for a large audience in a userfriendly way in order to promote transparency, accountability and effectiveness. Improvements on the existing database in terms of comprehensiveness as well as functionality are planned. Research institutes and non-governmental organisations are hoping that AidData will allow them to get a better understanding of the reality of aid. On the AidData conference in Oxford some innovative research projects using data from AidData were already presented.