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The First Tranche

Welcome to the First Tranche, the AidData blog--a forum for analysis and discussion of information about development finance, and how it can be used to improve development practice and research. The First Tranche publishes independent views and analysis from a variety of bloggers who are interested in aid transparency, aid effectiveness, and better/more accessible aid information.
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The First Tranche | a blog by the staff of AidData

Friday, May 25, 2012


This week in aid and transparency


Global Integrity broke 'open government' down into three core values: information transparency, public engagement, and accountability. Amina Az Zubair, CEO of Nigeria’s Centre for Development Policy Solutions, George Ndungu, National Coordinator for the Kenya Youth Network for Rio+20 & Beyond, and Augustine Njamnshi, Central Africa Region Coordinator for the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, all agree that good governance, transparency, and accountability are necessary for sustainable development. Participants at a follow-up meeting to the Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness agreed on a set of ten indicators that will serve as the basis for a global monitoring framework for development assistance. The indicators cover several issues including untied aid, transparency, mutual accountability, the role of the private sector, and women’s empowerment, among others.

The Financial Times Magazine interviewed UNICEF’s executive director, Anthony Lake; the article prompted responses from a number of observers. Among those reacting is Tom Murphy (blogging at A View From The Cave), who feels Lake is behind the times in regard to evaluating aid interventions (note those tweeting about it at the end of his post). Knowledge Management on a Dollar a Day also joined in saying aid has steadily become more evidence based, listing six current signs that it will continue on that path: the results agenda, aid transparency, open data and research, real time data analysis, beneficiary feedback, and better volume and depth of discussion on this issue.

The U.S. Senate voted to cut aid for Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan, while increasing aid to Jordan by $50 million. 

Taryn Davis is a Communications Intern at Development Gateway.
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Friday, May 18, 2012


This week in aid and transparency


With the start of the G8 Summit today, the Huffington Post has dedicated an entire webpage to G8 news, including this article on why accountability is critical to ensure that the G8 keeps its promises, and 10 second videos from the public on the issues that merit close attention.  ONE interviewed Ambassador Don Steinberg, current Deputy Administrator for USAID, on global food security, and has launched the ONE Street Tweeter to make sure addressing world hunger is a prominent topic at the G8. The Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security at the G8 Summit, taking place today, will be live streamed for the public.

Oxfam America has filed a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission for unlawfully delaying the issuance of a Final Rule implementing a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that requires disclosure of payments from oil, gas and mining companies to the US and foreign governments. As a partner in the Publish What You Pay Coalition, ONE previously delivered over 140,000 petition signatures to the SEC urging them to issue the rule.

The Forum for Agricultural Risk Management in Development (FARMD) introduced the World Bank’s internal tool for capturing, organizing, and assisting in the analysis of geospatial data, GeoSDN, and interviewed GIS Analyst Ben Stuart on the new tool.

The UN released the first Africa Human Development Report. Ricardo Fuentes-Nieve, who worked on the report, summarized a few of the key points, while Lawrence Haddad, Director of the Institute of Development Studies, bemoaned the fact that the “Empowerment for Justice, Gender Equity and Food for Everyone” chapter came last instead of first.


Taryn Davis is a Communications Intern at Development Gateway.
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Friday, May 11, 2012


This week in aid and transparency


The Guardian reported on a recently published study on the Millennium Village Project (MVP). The study, authored by Jeffrey Sachs and others, points to large reductions in child mortality within the Millennium Villages as a result of the project. However, others suggest that MVP's impact is overstated. Lawrence Haddad takes issue with comparing the Millennium Village sites to villages where data were not collected until year three of the MVP. Tom Murphy suggests they should be compared against villages receiving targeted interventions to truly judge the impact of the comprehensive suite of aid interventions that defines the MVP. Aid Thoughts points to the overall decrease in child mortality throughout the countries where the Millennium Villages are located, questioning whether the impact observed can be directly attributed to the MVP.

Meanwhile, “Beltway Bandits” are putting up a fight against a USAID reform that increases the amount of funding channeled through local actors to 30% by 2015. Humanosphere reports on the resistance to untied aid, and Oxfam is partnering with other organizations to fight back in support of the reform. Gregory Adams explains why anti-corruption activists support direct funding to local actors to solve local development problems. 


Taryn Davis is a Communications Intern at Development Gateway. 
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Friday, May 4, 2012


This week in aid and transparency


The annual InterAction Forum took place earlier this week, bringing together key players in international development to discuss a wide range of issues related to development and humanitarian work. In the opening plenary, Maria Otero, Undersecretary of Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights at the State Department, and Don Steinberg, USAID Deputy Administrator, both talked about the importance of transparency and collaboration in global development. Later in the afternoon, a panel that included Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development, Bill Sweeney from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations, and David Yang of USAID debated the question of what should replace the MDGs. On Wednesday, InterAction CEO Sam Worthington had a conversation with World Bank President Robert Zoellick. They discussed Zoellick’s five years as President and future directions for the institution. Take a look at other key highlights from the forum here. Next month’s edition of InterAction’s Monthly Developments magazine will cover the rest of the forum (keep an eye out for summaries of Blogging: Bridging the Gap Between Messaging and Candor, and Technology in Development-Focusing on the End User, two fantastic workshops that I attended.)

In other news, the Chief Economists of the World Bank got together to discuss the state of development economics in their respective regions (here are summaries of their views related to Africa, South Asia, and Europe and Central Asia). Whydev.org considers trade, rather than aid, the new key to economic growth. Meanwhile, the US is tripling military aid to the Philippines in 2012, and Japan is providing 250 million yen to Nepal to increase food production.

Tom Slee believes the “Open Data Movement” is a joke, but many disagree, including Alex Howard of gov20.govfresh, and Tom Lee of the Sunlight Foundation, who tell him why they think he is wrong. 

Taryn Davis is a Communications Intern at Development Gateway.
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Thursday, May 3, 2012


Increasing the Development Impact of Open Data

Image: Sunlight Foundation via Twitter

The Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Camp is an annual gathering of activists, “hacktivists”, journalists, researchers, data wonks, government employees, and programmers, and the de facto epicenter for the emerging Open Government movement.  Over three days, transparency enthusiasts illuminating every level of government—from local assemblies to international organizations—exchange their successes and challenges in transforming raw data into meaningful change for their communities and stakeholders.

Since the conference’s inception three years ago, a surfeit of new technologies, data, and norms supporting transparency and accountability have emerged. A central problem, which “OpenGov” must now address, is information inequity: who does open information work for? Does access to solely web-based platforms for disseminating government data only exacerbate social and economic inequality? How can we get this information in the hands of the right change agents?

One of OpenGov’s core principles is the notion that government data is a public good. Some have argued that in terms of poverty alleviation, public information might be just as important as access to clean water and education. In order to impartially disseminate public information, then, an organization must design its data liberation strategy with both effective technologies and appropriate public policies in mind. Too frequently, however, something is lost in translation between the technical problem-solvers and the “big picture” policy thinkers.

In this  sense, delivering public data is like building a house: there are future “tenants” (policymakers and end-users) who will “live in” the house but have a vague idea of what an ideal design might look like, and then there are “contractors” executing the design (data experts and programmers). Often missing in this data-delivery process are the “architects”—those who speak both technical and policy languages and can help create a blueprint for success. Indeed, the dual tracks of an upcoming Data.gov conference suggest a split in the global transparency movement that now comprises two distinct yet interrelated camps: the “Open Government” advocates for political change, and the data-driven technologists who enable “Open Data”.

This brings us back to the question of who benefits from the transparency movement. At a session entitled “Open Data in Closed Societies”, journalists from undemocratic states discussed the personal risks of requesting open, machine-readable data in political cultures where bribery, patronage, and coercion are systemic.  Simply providing the technology required for Open Data is no substitute for the complex work of governance reform. As Chief Tech Officer of the USG, Todd Park, pointed out, “You can’t pour data on a wound and heal it”.

When it comes to delivering global development finance data, AidData is uniquely positioned to serve in this “architect” role. As a partnership between university researchers, technology innovators, and development professionals, AidData has the ability to bridge the policy-tech divide in development assistance. In the past year, for example, AidData designed and implemented a randomized controlled trial to identify effective models for collecting grassroots feedback from project beneficiaries, while at the same time building an interactive “Disaster Aid Tracking” dashboard (soon to be released) for the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). To me, Transparency Camp reinforces the idea of this bridge spanning the knowledge gaps between technologists, policy experts, and citizens.

Brian O’Donnell is an AidData Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at the College of William & Mary.
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Tuesday, May 1, 2012


The limitations of donor mapping: Inedible food aid


The readers of this blog are familiar with the argument that aid fragmentation combined with the lack of comprehensive data on aid undermines aid effectiveness. Various initiatives are currently trying to improve the situation by tracking and mapping donor engagement.

But what if donors’ funding bears zero relationship to the impact of the aid they finance?

Let’s take the case of food aid. In 2008-2009, following a brief war between Georgia and Russia, the World Food Programme (WFP) received donor funding to deliver food aid to tens of thousands of displaced people in Georgia. WFP’s food aid programme was the dream of every aspiring aid mapper. Numerous donors channelled their funds through a single UN body that had a clear mandate and a monopoly on providing a single type of aid, making it easy to track financial inputs. Further downstream, WFP only had four sub-contractors, all of them reputable international NGOs. Given the de-fragmentation of food aid at the sub-donor level, compiling and analyzing financial aid data was comparatively simple. 

Even better, the relationship between financial inputs and aid outputs is seemingly straightforward. All food parcels delivered by WFP are standardized in line with global SPHERE standards. Within Georgia, all beneficiaries received identical food packages. Across countries, all food parcels contain the same amount of calories, albeit only if funding requests are fully met. In theory, this makes it easy to use donor data or WFP delivery reports to determine the aid-financed calorie intake of refugees in any given country. 

Unless, of course, the food being distributed is not edible.

In early 2009, Georgian aid recipients discovered that something was wrong with the flour in their food aid packages. Bread baked with the new flour turned rock hard and was for all practical purposes inedible. One displaced Georgian described it as "not fit for animals". Despite widespread complaints, WFP ordered the flour distribution to continue. Over the following weeks, WFP and the NGOs handed out 800 metric tons, the equivalent of 1.6 million individual daily rations, to tens of thousands of displaced people.

While its ‘beneficiaries’ were feeding the flour to their pigs, WFP publicly maintained that “the quality and fitness for human consumption is good”. Food aid donors, including USAID and the European Commission, apparently remained unaware that WFP had just wasted over half a million dollars of their money. After all, each parcel was accounted for on paper, so the operation was officially a success.

Tracking donor finances can contribute to making aid more accountable, but aid mappers have to be aware of the limitations of their approach. While aid data can tell us a lot about some things, conclusions about outputs, impacts or effectiveness should be drawn with extreme caution – even where the links between inputs and outputs seem straightforward and crystal clear.


Till Bruckner was the Aid Monitoring Coordinator of Transparency International Georgia during 2008-2009. The views expressed here are those of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of TI Georgia. Photo credits: Hannah Mintek.
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