For the second time in recent weeks aid policy wonks will have the opportunity to argue about the best way to measure the relative transparency of different donors. Publish What You Fund (PWYF) has just published a massive report that attempts to assess the transparency of 30 donors. While PWYF looks at three broad areas of transparency (equally weighted) and seven specific indicators of transparency, they also provide an interactive tool that allows web users to re-weight the distinct areas of transparency based on their own judgments of their relative importance. A few weeks ago Brookings and CGD produced a Quality of Official Development Aid (QuODA) Report where one of the features they measured was the relative transparency of different donors. Unlike the QuODA report, the PWYF assessment focuses exclusively on transparency.

The headlines of the new PWYF report are not all that surprising for people who study development finance. But the fact that they confirm conventional wisdom and echo many of the findings in the QuODA report, should increase our confidence in their conclusions. Here are the headlines: Information provided by donors is not timely or easily comparable; The World Bank, Netherlands, and UK are the most transparent donors; Japan, Austria, Portugal, and Italy are the least transparent donors; And we would all benefit from an international standard (like the one suggested here) specifying the type and format of data that donors were obligated to make public.

Over the weekend I'm hoping to find time to compare the QuODA metrics with the PWYF metrics, but for now let me throw out a few quick reactions.

1. I'm very happy to see all these transparency assessments. Such reports provide transparency advocates within aid organizations with evidence to help them push for greater openness. These reports also provide ammunition for external critics who are advocating for access to more information. Both QuODA and PWYF promise to publish their assessments on an annual basis. This will allow all observers to see which donors are becoming more transparent in both absolute and relative terms. I'm hoping these publications promote a "race to the top" in terms of transparency.

2. Like the QuODA report, the PWYF assessment looks mostly at the usual suspects. The authors do include GAVI alongside traditional donors, but in the future it would be nice to include more donors in these studies.

3. If you focus exclusively on "commitment to aid transparency," which includes participation in IATI, reporting to the CRS, and whether a donor has a robust FOIA-like regime, then Ireland comes out as the most transparent donor in the study. Had I read the measures for this variable six months ago, I'd have been skeptical of their actual impact on current transparency levels. However, researchers at AidData who are currently trying to convince non-traditional donors to give us access to their aid information are having a much easier time in countries that do have enforceable FOIA-like policies (India) than in those that do not (China and Russia). Also, while IATI participation may not matter directly in 2010, it is very likely to be a good predictor of transparency going forward.

4. If you focus exclusively on "transparency to recipient governments," then multilateral development banks take 4 of the top 5 positions. This is especially noteworthy since there are only four MDBs among the 30 donors in the study! Could this result follow from the fact that recipient governments are members of those MDBs and thus help to determine the policies of the MDBs? Some recent academic research (beware of shameless self-promotion) suggests a mechanism for such a conclusion.

I'm encouraged that so many people in the academic, advocacy, and policy worlds are focussing increased attention on aid transparency. If we keep this up we are likely to learn something and to to increase the effectiveness of development outcomes.

This post was written by Brad Parks, an AidData Principal Investigator, and Nakul Kadaba (William and Mary ’11). We would like to thank William Towah and Princetta Clinton-Varmah from the Government of Liberia's Aid Management Unit for providing FY2009/10 data on the use of various aid modalities.

Augustine Ngafuan has an unenviable task. As Liberia's Minister of Finance, he is responsible for trying to manage the tidal wave of development assistance flowing into his country. The vast majority of Liberia's foreign aid is "off-budget," which means that money goes directly to NGOs and contractors to implement development projects. So while the Government of Liberia's official budget of $374 million for Fiscal Year 2009-2010 includes $23 million of foreign assistance, these figures don’t even come close to showing Liberia’s total resource envelope. More than doubling the government's total budget, Liberia receives an estimated $449 million in annual off-budget foreign assistance. And this estimate of off-budget aid excludes unknown amounts of funding from UNMIL, China, private foundations, and several bilateral and UN agencies.

Yesterday the World Bank unveiled an interactive mapping tool that allows users to view the locations within a country where World Bank project dollars are spent, view expenditures by sector, and overlay these projects with sub-national data on poverty, population, infant mortality, etc...  The three countries that are currently mappable in this beta version are Kenya, Bolivia, and the Philippines.  The underlying data used in this mapping tool was created this summer when AidData researchers partnered with the World Bank on a project called Mapping for Results.

In addition to the searchable maps on the World Bank website, my colleagues Mike Findley, Dan Nielson, and Josh Powell are working on several case studies of aid allocation.  In Nepal active World Bank projects are visible on maps showing population density and poverty rates.


A case study in Africa focuses on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a country's conflict history can have a major impact on the location of development projects.  According to Findley and his colleagues, "While few agricultural, energy, or water supply projects went to the Kivu regions, many health and transportation-related projects did locate there. In fact, health appears the overwhelming focus of the World Bank in DRC, while the transportation projects largely target the borders with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. This suggests that the World Bank’s country strategy in DRC seeks to improve the health of the general population while promoting regional integration to facilitate trade."


In a Thursday panel hosted by the Bank on Open Development Solutions Aleem Walji, Manager for Innovation at the World Bank Institute, highlighted the possibilities of using open data to create apps and maps.  Walji suggested that if the World Bank and other donors provide data in an open format and free of charge, that users would build things that we currently "can't even imagine."  To test that proposition the World Bank is sponsoring an Apps for Development Competition where users will be invited to use World Bank data to build applications addressing at least one of the MDGs.

For users who want the underlying data used in the Mapping for Results project, each country has a page like this one for Kenya that allows you to download in csv format.  Very cool and very useful.  I do hope other donors and aid organizations follow the lead of the World Bank in making their data publicly available and in learning how to geo-code their project locations.

Any field of study has it's own jargon and acronyms, but sometimes it feels that those of us studying and working in international affairs must memorize more than our fair share. Keeping straight all the ADBs, IDBs, and UN agency abbreviations can be frustrating.

We thought we'd save you a little time from memorizing or googling acronyms and make it as easy as possible to find what you are looking for. So we've updated our donor names.

Now you don't have to google "BADEA" to know that it is the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa and you don't have to be confused because there is no "IDB" in our database; instead you'll find that the Inter-American Development Bank is abbreviated as IADB to distinguish it from the Islamic Development Bank, ISDB.

We hope this saves you some time and frustration as you are searching for the data you want.

If you have any other feedback regarding changes you'd like to see to the user interface (or if you need assistance finding the data you want), please feel free to contact us at info@aiddata.org (or leave a comment on this post)

Which donors give aid well and which need to improve?  These (and many more specific) questions are addressed in a new report issued by the Center for Global Development and the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development Program.  The report is authored by Nancy Birdsall and Homi Kharas and is designed to be updated and published annually. For data nerds there is plenty to get excited about.  For starters they use information from the AidData database in order to construct many of their aid quality indicators! 

More importantly, the report is packed with interesting descriptive and comparative statistics on donor agencies, which will have researchers and practitioners debating data, methods, and indicator weightings for a long time.  Unlike some previous efforts to rank donor effectiveness, the authors are explicit about their assumptions and remarkably transparent about their methods, data, and justifications for the decisions they have made.  As a result, they have opened themselves up to criticism, but have dramatically increased the probability that we will actually learn something about development. As important, their own transparency makes it more likely that the authors will improve upon their methods and data in future iterations of this project.  KUDOS.


The report ranks both donors and donor agencies in terms of four broad categories -- Maximizing Efficiency; Fostering Institutions; Reducing Burden; and (my favorite) Transparency and Learning.  These broad categories are broken down into 30 different specific indicators and the authors do a very clear job of unpacking the broader categories so that you can focus on the indicators you really care about.  The report ranks 31 donors and 152 different development agencies. 

While the first edition of this report will be accessible to policy wonks and researchers, QuODA also has a related interactive web tool that allows the user to select the donors, agencies, or variables that he or she wants to analyze or graph.  Readers beware.  I just flushed 90 minutes playing with this thing instead of writing mid-term exam essay questions.  It is very cool.  If you have other work that you need to do today, do not click on this link.

OK, I really do have to go write an exam, so here are my last few comments on this for tonight.

1.  I'd love to see the authors add more donors going forward.  The report does not analyze the quality of Non-DAC Bilateral donors and only includes a handful of multilateral donors.  Of course, this is easy for me to say since I will not be producing this massive report for years to come.

2.  If you want to download the wonkcast interview with the two authors, you can get that here and if you want to see video of the roll out with Q&A click here.

3.  It is nice to see evidence-based advocacy.  Too often development discourse is characterized by doctrinaire advocacy or sterile social science published in journals that few people read.  The authors of this report and the associated web tool are explicit about their goals: "We hope that public scrutiny and discussion will help us improve our methods and contribute to healthy pressure on official and private aid funders to make information on their aid practices and policies better and more accessible."    Me too.