The First Tranche

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

AidData Map-Off!

Accepting USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah’s challenge to “inspire and support the next generation of development leaders,” AidData staff is engaging students at the College of William and Mary to put their geocoding and mapping skills to the test. As a part of AidData’s partnership with USAID through the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN), students will be participating in the first annual AidData Map-Off. Over the next five weeks, student contestants will develop a research question related to the targeting, coordination, and effectiveness of foreign aid, analyze geocoded aid information to address their research questions, and display their results in a map and accompanying blog post.

To set the stage for the competition, Salim Sawaya, global affairs account manager at Esri, and Ben Arancibia of AidData's team at Development Gateway came to the College of William and Mary to provide comprehensive training for AidData student research assistants and GIS students participating in the Map-Off. Our experts, including AidData's College of William & Mary GIS staff, Albert Decatur and Ian Reese, gave a crash course in ArcGIS Online for personal use, a free software that enables the user to create geocoded maps, guidance on developing research questions, and advice on how to use data visualization tools and blog posts to tell the story of international development.

Entries will be judged based on the thoroughness of research, quality of writing, demonstration of mapping skills, and the applicability of the geocoded map to the research question. The blog posts will be posted on the First Tranche starting in mid-April. and the winning blog post will be announced on April 10^th, and will be featured on USAID’s Impact Blog.

Suzannah Dunbar is a Project Manager for AidData, based at the College of William & Mary. Email her if you have any questions or suggestions about the inaugural AidData #MapOff

Monday, March 25, 2013

This week in citizen engagement and open government: #engagevoices

Citizen Engagement

Last week started with a bunch of people discussing the individual at the Citizen Voices Conference at the World Bank. If you missed the #wblive event, you can catch up by watching the webcast and highlights. Participants voted for the single most important thing that needs to be done to move the citizen engagement agenda forward. The top vote? To engage citizens in the process.

The conversation continued the following day at Citizen Voices UK: A Global Conference on Citizen Engagement for Enhanced Development Impact. Check out the conversation via #engagevoices.

The UN launched an Open Government Data for Citizen Engagement in Managing Development Toolkit. A Working Version welcomes comments and suggestions to the toolkit. An effort to receive citizen feedback on the toolkit would be a step towards responding to the top vote from the Citizen Voices poll.

Tech for Dev

Great steps are being taken throughout the world to use technology to enhance transparency and accountability. Check out eleven new initiatives that were awarded grants by Transparency International. A majority of them are focused on engaging citizens in government processes -one targeted towards mobile gamers in Hungary.

How the World uses fresh water via World Bank

A new data visual blog, Charting Progress, by Development Initiatives was launched last week. While it is currently heavily ODA focused, I hope to see some more creative charts in its future on a broad range of poverty-ending issues.

World Water Day

World Water Day on Friday highlighted statistics such as “Every 20 seconds a child dies as a result of poor sanitation” and “1 in 7 people lack access to clean water.” As well as infographics such as the one created by World Bank on how the World uses freshwater. Visually put together an entire Pinterest board of infographics for World Water Day to reference. Unfortunately, this issue is not a one day a year affair for many of the world.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

QCRI develops automated Geotagger for the World Bank

- Automated Geotagger geocodes all Bank-financed projects based on project documentation
- System helps geocode and map vast amounts of current, historic and pipeline project data to help
better monitor and improve the impact of development assistance
-System designed in collaboration with major global aid organizations

Doha, Qatar, 19 March 2013: Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) has developed a system for the World Bank that automates the geocoding of all Bank-financed projects. The system, built by QCRI’s Data Analytics team, enables more efficient and effective labeling of the Bank’s project portfolios and places them on a map for analysis, monitoring and evaluation.

The QCRI Geotagger system augments the World Bank’s Mapping for Results initiative, a partnership with AidData, which manually geocoded all active World Bank-financed projects in 144 countries. Mapping for Results is part of the Bank’s Open Data initiative, which allows for more transparency of its activities and access to information that promises to produce new analysis, tools and solutions to development challenges.

Patrick Meier, Director of Social Innovation at QCRI, said of the Institute’s involvement, “We have a strong social mission at QCRI and this project reflects our commitment to that mission. The Geotagger enables the World Bank and partners to turn Open Data into useable data, which will bring more transparency and accountability to the international development space. QCRI's Data Analytics team is well placed to support the World Bank's effort in making sense of this development data thanks to our advanced expertise in applied analytics research."

QCRI’s Data Analytics team has built expertise focused on researching core data management challenges such as data extraction, integration and quality, with the objective of identifying new directions and techniques for enabling the effective use of data for decision-making. Leveraging this expertise, the team developed a system to access the World Bank’s datasets, retrieve documents, extract and report relevant information on the Bank’s projects.

The system identifies locations and place names in documents from the World Bank Projects Data API using the Stanford Name Entity Recognizer and Alchemy, a text-mining platform. The place names are then geocoded using Google Geocoder, Yahoo! Placefinder and Geonames, and are visualised on a map.

The system also accesses and geocodes information from the World Bank’s procurement notices in order to compare project documents with procurement data, which has been made available for the first time in the Mapping for Results initiative. The developed system thus combines the locations with financial data to provide a holistic view on project expenses.

Aleem Walji, Director at World Bank Innovation Labs, welcomed this exciting opportunity to partner with Qatar Computing Research Institute. “Our vision is to innovate by bringing technology into World Bank projects and we hope to collaborate on other exciting project in the future,” he said.

Since the launch of Mapping for Results, three generations of interns read many thousands of pages of World Bank project documentation, safeguard documents, and results reports to identify and geocode exact project locations. Though very successful, the initiative had encompassed only the active projects due to its heavy reliance on manpower.

The automation and effectiveness provided by QCRI’s Geotagger system also enables the geocoding and mapping of historic projects, allowing researchers to look at the evolving World Bank portfolio from a new, more disaggregated and spatial angle.

“QCRI’s Geotagger tool will be a huge help to AidData and the Open Aid Partnership in geocoding other donors’ project portfolios,” said Stephen Davenport, Co-Executive Director of AidData and Senior Director for Innovation at the Development Gateway. Looking forward towards future projects with Qatar Computing Research Institute, he continued, “We hope to explore opportunities around automatically identifying the sector activities of development projects and crawling the web for project-specific sources of development finance information.”

Brad Parks, AidData's Co-Executive Director at the College of William & Mary in the US, noted, "the Geotagger tool will support AidData's efforts - through a new partnership with USAID and its Higher Education Solutions Network - to generate geospatial aid information and decision support tools that help development finance institutions make smarter policy and programming decisions."

END

For more information, please contact:
Kimberly Mathern
QCRI Communications Manager
Office: +(974) 4454 2515
Mobile: +(974) 6645 5177
Email: kmathern@qf.org.qa

Stephen Davenport
Co-Executive Director of AidData
Development Gateway
Tel: +1.202.572.9284
Email: sdavenport@developmentgateway.org
Twitter: @davenportsteve

Rachel Winter Jones
Senior Communications Officer
World Bank Institute
Tel: (202) 473-1920
Email: rjones1@worldbank.org

About QCRI
Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) was established in 2010 by Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, a private, non-profit organization that is supporting Qatar’s transformation from a hydrocarbon-based economy to knowledge-based economy.

QCRI supports Qatar Foundation’s mission to build Qatar’s innovation and technology capacity by focusing on large-scale computing challenges that address national priorities for growth and development.

In doing this, QCRI conducts world-class multidisciplinary computing research that is relevant to the needs of Qatar, the wider Arab region, and the world. It performs cutting-edge research in such areas as Arabic language technologies, social computing, data analytics, and cloud computing.

The research conducted at QCRI is aligned with the Qatar National Research Strategy and supports the strategic priorities outlined in the Qatar National Vision 2030. For more information, please visit www.qcri.qa.

About AidData
AidData—a joint initiative of Development Gateway, the College of William & Mary, and Brigham Young University—is a global leader in the provision of reliable, timely, and detailed information about foreign assistance projects. AidData tracks more than $5.5 trillion dollars from 90 donor agencies, undertakes cutting-edge research on aid distribution and impact, oversees efforts to geocode and crowdsource aid information, and develops web and mobile applications and custom data solutions for development finance institutions.

In November 2012, AidData entered into a five year partnership with USAID, through its Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN), to address a critical information gap that confounds efforts to effectively deliver foreign assistance: the absence of sub-nationally geocoded aid data. Through this partnership, the AidData Center for Development Policy will create high-resolution geospatial data and decision support tools that enable the global development community to more effectively target, coordinate, monitor, and evaluate overseas aid investments.

For more information about AidData and the AidData Center for Development Policy, please visit www.aiddata.org. For more information about USAID's Higher Education Solutions Network, please visit http://www.usaid.gov/hesn.

About the World Bank Group
The World Bank Group is made up of five unique international development institutions owned by 187 member countries: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) together with the International Development Association (IDA) — widely known as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Each of these World Bank Group institutions plays a different, but collaborative role in advancing the vision of inclusive and sustainable economic growth in a globalized world. The IBRD aims to support growth in middle-income countries and reduce poverty in creditworthy poorer countries, while the IDA focuses on the world’s poorest states.

Monday, March 18, 2013

This Week in #opendata and #opengov: Habemus Data, Sunshine Week and more

Open Data Changing the World

This week the Harvard Business Review argued that “we need open data to change the world,” encouraging organizations to adopt a default position “to share all the data you can.” This principle is reflected in the African Information Highway initiative of the African Development Bank (AfDB) which is “aimed at significantly improving data management and dissemination in Africa.” The AfDB launched Open Data Platforms for 20 African countries this week as a part of this initiative and plans to complete platforms for the remaining African countries by July 2013. These platforms will enable users to “gain access to reliable and timely data on Africa” and will provide an important step forward to improving the extent and availability of development data in Africa.

In the United States, this week was Sunshine Week, an annual open-government initiative that aims to promote a nationwide discussion about the importance of access to public information. The Washington Post noted that the US Government received “mixed assessments on transparency levels” during this year’s Sunshine Week. A report by the Center for Effective Government found that, while the Obama administration has issued “an impressive number of directives, executive orders, plans, and other actions aimed at bolstering government openness,” its record is tarnished by the “notable, glaring exception of national security.”

A 21st century civil right

On Monday, Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announced the launch of “open.ny.gov” which will provide data from more than 30 state agencies, including data on economic development, health, public services, and recreation. The launch of this site fulfills a promise that Governor Cuomo made in his January 2013 State of the State address to "harness technology to show how taxpayer money is being spent, showcase the great resources of the state, and foster productive engagement with government.” New York State took a major step forward in the recognition as further indication that “having meaningful access to data generated by your government is becoming a 21st century civil right.”

2013 Human Development Report Released

On Thursday, the UNDP released the 2013 Human Development Report, titled “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World.” The report includes the 2013 Human Development Index (HDI) rankings, which shows the US falling 13 places once inequality is taken into account. The Guardian reports that Norway once again comes out top in the HDI rankings, while Burkina Faso, Chad, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Niger finish at the bottom of the rankings. The 2013 Human Development Report presents an optimistic view of development progress, finding that fourteen countries have recorded rates of progress of more than 2% on the Human Development Index annually since 2000, with Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia at the top of this list.

New Hosts for IATI

On Wednesday, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) steering committee decided that the UNDP, Sweden, UNOPS, Ghana and Development Initiatives, will work as a consortium and share responsibility for hosting IATI. They will take over hosting responsibilities from DfID, which has hosted IATI since 2009. Publish What You Fund has released a an analysis of donors’ plans to implement the IATI reporting standard and has also released an open source application to analyze the common standard implementation schedules.

Habemus Data!

Last week’s Papal Conclave in which Pope Francis was elected as the 266^th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church provided an excellent opportunity for fellow data enthusiasts to analyze papal voting patterns, assemble the “full data history of the Pope”, assess the demographics of the Cardinals in attendance, and even visualize the Papal Conclave in Peeps. The election of the Roman Catholic Church’s first Jesuit and first non-European Pope in more than 1,200 years is perhaps a reflection of changing times. Many are wondering what the election of a Latin American Pope will mean for developing countries, calling the selection of Pope Francis “an obvious reorientation of the church to the global south.”

This weekly update was written by Alena Stern (@AlenaStern) of AidData's William & Mary office; email her for tips for next week's update to get a shout-out in the post.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Research Coordinator position at AidData

AidData is looking to bring on a Research Coordinator for a six month position. The postion will be based at the College of William and Mary, with consultations with USAID in Washington DC. We are looking to fill the position as soon as possible

The Research Coordinator will help to establish the governing guidelines of the AidData Research Consortium, which will pioneer new research on the sub-national determinants of aid distribution and impact. For further information, please see the official listing here: https://jobs.wm.edu/postings/13206.

You can also find out more about other career opportunities with AidData here.

Contact Suzannah Dunbar (sdunbar@aiddata.org) with any questions.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Chinese and U.S. Foreign Assistance: Who Wins in Uganda?

The following is a guest post by Professors Helen Milner of Princeton University, Dan Nielson of Brigham Young University, and Mike Findley of The University of Texas-Austin.

Background
In 2012, researchers from Princeton, University of Texas, and Brigham Young University randomly sampled a representative group of nearly 3600 Ugandan citizens throughout Uganda and also interviewed a large sample of local council leaders and national members of parliament. They asked four sets of questions to citizens, local council elected officials, and members of parliament.

A survey on Uganda preferences vis-a-vis U.S. and China revealed the following 4 results:
1.) Ugandan citizens trust the U.S. more than China
2.) Uganda local leaders trust U.S. individuals over Chinese individuals
3.) Local leaders have high recognition and high levels of support for the
U.S. Agency for International Development
4.) Ugandans prefer U.S. aid over Chinese aid

Which country do Ugandans trust?

First, we asked citizens how much they trusted the United States vs. China. Citizens report 3.0 for the United States vs. 2.6 for China (on a scale of 1 to 4 with 4 being most positive). When subject to a statistical “difference of means” test, we can conclude with high confidence that the observed difference is meaningful and not due to random chance. This means that there is a significant preference among Ugandan citizens favoring the U.S. over China.

Which individuals do Ugandans trust?

Second, we asked local council leaders about how much they trusted the U.S. people vs. the people of China. We learn that the mean level of trust in U.S. people is 3.2 in contrast to a trust score of 2.8 for Chinese people (with 4 being the most positive). A statistical difference in means test shows that these two scores are meaningfully different from each other. These local leaders show evidence for preferring the U.S. to China.

What is the impression of USAID?

Third, we asked citizens, local council leaders, and members of parliament whether they had heard of USAID and, if so, how much they trusted it. For the three groups, 42% of citizens had heard of USAID, 96% of local council leaders report having heard of USAID, and 94% of members of parliament report having heard of USAID. For those having heard of USAID, citizens reported a mean level of trust in the Agency of 3.4 (on a scale from 1 to 4, with 4 being highest). Local council leaders reported the highest mean level of trust for USAID at 3.7 out of 4. And members of parliament reported levels of trust at 3.6. These are quite strong expressions of support for USAID.

U.S. Aid or Chinese Aid?

To learn how citizens view foreign aid from the U.S. vs. China, we presented information about actual aid projects that were co-financed by international organizations where both the U.S. and China have seats on the executive boards. We randomly assigned the named donor in an experiment, so all other factors were held constant and only the name of the donors was altered. In this second step, we asked citizens to express varying degrees of support (or lack thereof) depending on whether the aid project came from the U.S. or China. Each step in this involved an increased level of cost for the respondent and hence we believe revealed stronger evidence for their stated preference. There were six levels of support citizens could offer:

1.) They could say how much they supported the project on a scale from 1 to 4,

with 4 being high support

2.) They could commit to telling their local leaders about their preferences for the aid project

3.) They could commit to signing a petition to be delivered to the government and donors

signaling their preferences

4.) They could actually sign a petition, which we provided to them that would be delivered

to the donors

5.) They could commit to sending an SMS/text expressing their preferences about the project

6.) They could actually send the SMS/text for which we provided requisite information to them

In four of the six cases, we observed no difference in citizens’ willingness to differentiate between the U.S. and China. Specifically, in numbers 1, 3, 4, and 5, citizens were nearly indifferent between the U.S. and China. However, individuals were more willing to tell their local leaders that they supported U.S. projects. Citizens also sent the SMS/text message more frequently in support of U.S. projects over Chinese projects. Indeed, the proportion of citizens sending texts in support of U.S. projects tripled compared to Chinese projects (9 percent vs. 3 percent).

These findings suggest stronger support for U.S. aid than for China’s among a representative random sample of Ugandans.

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