AidData: The First Tranche

A World without Aid Transparency: Dispatch from the Frontlines in Bangladesh

2012-02-09T17:12:00.000-05:00

Bangladesh is a country with thousands of developmentorganizations, each with hundreds of concurrent projects. For some perspective,in 2003 there were 6,559 development NGOsoperating in the country, almost one for every village. The proliferationof aid actors in every conceivable sector--from social welfare to governanceand the environment--raises a fundamental question: What is actually happeningon the ground? For all these projects, many of which share similar goals andlocations, there is limited available information on how the aid actuallyassists impoverished peoples.

Last year, I worked for the World Food Programme inBangladesh, and observed firsthand how a lack of information sharing on-the-groundcan hinder effective targeting of aid projects. Since development organizationshave limited resources, they generally attempt to target their projects toareas of greatest need. I assisted with the initial implementation of a flood Emergency ResponseOperation in Satkhira, Bangladesh, a program targeting individualsdisplaced by the flood as well as pregnant women and young children.

One of our tasks was to cross-check the beneficiaries selected by ourNGO partner to ensure they were being chosen according to the properneeds-based criteria. As we drove along broken roads lined with makeshiftshelters constructed from bamboo, jute, cloth, and plastic tarps, I anticipatedmeeting people in extremely dire conditions. But when we arrived at the firsthousehold on our list, a fully intact bamboo and mud house, I had a feelingthat something was not quite right. As it turned out, the family had beeneconomically hurt by the flood, but they had not been displaced. Othervillagers who we talked to mentioned the same phenomenon: that certain people alwaysseem to get selected for aid projects while others who are worse off do not. Afterchecking a total of ten households, we found that four of them had been selectedincorrectly, and reported to the WFP office immediately.

As much as development organizations try to closely monitorproject implementation, it is impossible to account for every detail of on-the-groundactivity. NGOs sometimes find it advantageous to selecttheir existing beneficiaries, or those who are not severely affected, in orderto report significant improvements to their donors. Therefore, even if an NGOdoes not completely follow the implementation guidelines by targeting the intendedbeneficiaries, donors will have the false satisfaction of believing theirproject had its intended outcome. In order to identify projects where the samewell-off households are repeatedly included on the beneficiary list, villagersneed to be able to report on the aid they are receiving and who is being leftout. Such a system would impose a check on NGO activity, pressuring them to targethouseholds with greatest need.

Increased transparency can also encourage bettercoordination between all of the different agencies working in a singlelocation. In the case of the Satkhira flooding, numerous aid organizations had apresence, each with their own objectives. Everywhere I went I saw an assortmentof development organization logos on shelters, latrines, and food rations. Itwas difficult to discern if there was any overarching coordination strategy.Indeed, as we talked to more people, they explained that some groups came infor a few days to give away bags of rice, while others had longer-term plansfor building up the infrastructure and embankments. Wouldn’t it be more usefulif the recipients of the development assistance could report on what aid theywere receiving and what aid they still needed? Then, other donors could get a better picture of the situation and allocatefunding for future projects accordingly.

In addition to improving aid coordination, transparency canenable development organizations to tailor projects to the specific needs ofcommunities. For example, I am currently working with Innovations for Poverty Action on arandomized control trial (RCT) that is implementing demand and supply sidetreatments to bolster use of latrines and sanitation practices in Bangladeshi villages.As I monitored the baseline survey, I discussed the current sanitationsituation with enumerators. Surprisingly, they discovered that not only wasthere a shortage of latrines in village households, but many village schools—builtby a local NGO—also lacked latrine access. This could be for a variety ofreasons. Perhaps the NGO had to build a certain number of schools and thebudget did not allow for latrine construction, or perhaps they used the extramoney for another project. But if the enumerators and villagers had a platformto report their observations on their latrines, donors could focus on funding thecrucial sanitation component for the existing and future schools.

Crowdsourcingmay be one way to address these sorts of coordination and targeting issues. Throughthe rapid diffusion of mobile technologies, people living and working indeveloping communities now have a mechanism to deliver real-time information onlocal conditions and project performance to donors. However, a common platform toaggregate, share, and make sense of monitoring and evaluation data does not yetexist.

AidData has recently overseen an RCT in Uganda to help developa workable crowdsourcing model, and I hope this work expands to other areassoon. My experiences in Bangladesh have given me a new appreciation for the importanceof repairing the broken feedback loop gap between donors and their intendedbeneficiaries. Identifying whether and how projects are functioning inimpoverished communities is the central to designing effective poverty alleviationprojects.

Ishita Ahmed is a former AidData Research Assistant at theCollege of William and Mary (’11).

New AidData Research Briefs Posted: Is Health and Education Aid Effective?

2012-01-30T16:24:00.000-05:00

We are happy to announce the release of two additional publicationsin our Research Brief series. These 3-5 page publications seek to make theempirical findings of AidData-affiliated faculty more accessible to policymakers, developmentpractitioners, journalists, and the general public.

Today’s release includes a brief entitled "Does Health Aid Reduce Mortality?". It is based on a fulllength journal article published by Sven Wilson in the November 2011 specialissue of World Development. We have also posted "When Does Education Aid Boost Enrollment Rates?", a brief byZachary Christensen, Dustin Homer, and Daniel Nielson, which is also based ona fulllength article published in the November 2011 specialissue of World Development.

AidData's research brief series is just one of several newresearch resources published as part of the late 2011 launch of AidData 2.0. Tomake the underlying data used to produce aid allocation and aid effectivenessresearch more accessible, we have posted or linked to 57replication datasets. And we are adding more datasets every month. We havealso assembled 18 “prepackaged” research datasets, derived from the core AidData database andfrom external sources. Additionally,we have compiled a list of ongoingprojects overseen by AidData-affiliated scholars, and a comprehensivecollection of all publishedarticles and bookswhich rely on AidData.org for empirical analysis.

If you would like to contribute replication data from yourpeer-reviewed article or book for posting on AidData, please contact info@aiddata.org.

Looking Beyond the Supervision-Outcome Relationship in World Bank Projects

2012-01-19T11:46:00.000-05:00

Over the last few weeks, we have been exploring whether there are newinsights to glean from the World Bank's massive evaluation dataset. The dataset consists of nearly 10,000 WorldBank projects with discrete categorical ratings for variables such as 'Quality atEntry', 'Quality of Supervision', 'Bank Performance', 'Borrower Performance',and 'Project Outcome'. One of theadvantages of the dataset is that it allows one to explore both the project-leveland country-level determinants of project performance.

In this post, we set out to assess the impact of project supervisionon final project outcomes as well as the relative influence of country-level factors,such as corruption and government stability. The first potential correlation weexamined was between 'Quality of Supervision' (QOS) and final project outcome. Consistentwith the approach taken in an earlier post on this blog, we converted the Bank'ssix-point QoS and project outcome measures into binary (satisfactory/unsatisfactory)variables. Because the large majority of World Bank projects recorded in thedatabase took place between the years 1984 and 2009, we excluded all prioryears from our analysis. All borrower countries that did not have QoS andproject outcome data for 10 discrete country-years during this timeframe were alsoexcluded, reducing the sample size to 72 countries. Remaining project QoS andoutcome values were averaged separately at the country-year level; thesecountry-year averages were then averaged at the country level. Each recipientcountry was thus assigned a pair of unique QoS and outcome ratings between 0(unsatisfactory) and 1 (satisfactory), which are displayed on a scatter plotbelow.

The results were not surprising: better project supervision generallyyielded better project performance. But what else might help determine thesuccess of a project? We used data from the PRSGroup’s International Country Risk Guide to assess several contextualfactors that may compromise project supervision and/or project outcomes:corruption, government stability, democratic accountability, bureaucraticquality and socioeconomic conditions. Specific country-year scores for each indicatorwere averaged for the period 1984-2009.These five composite indicators werethen compared to their respective QoS and project outcome scores.

Several interesting trends emerge for borrowers with at least ten years ofproject outcome data (92 countries total) and QoS data (72 total). Only the socioeconomicconditions indicator had a significant impact on the project supervision: thebetter the socioeconomic conditions in a given country, the higher the QoS. Othercountry-level factors, such as government stability, did not appear tosignificantly influence QoS scores.

We obtained stronger results in a similar analysis of project outcomes.Whereas the borrower government’s level of stability still has no apparent rolein determining a project’s success or failure, all other factors seem to havean impact; better socioeconomic conditions, lower levels of corruption, relativelyefficient bureaucratic instititutions, and higher levels of democratic accountabilityseem to increase the likelihood that World Bank projects will succeed. In fact,socioeconomic conditions seem nearly as important as QOS to a project’s final outcomerating.

Of course, these very simple regressions do not constitute definitiveresults. But our preliminary findings paint a picture familiar to many developmentpractitioners: while supervision of aid projects is important, so too is understandinghow general contextual factors shape the success and failure of projects.

This post was contributed by William& Mary students Dylan Murray ‘12, an AidData research assistant, and ChrisSalvi ’12, an AidData intern.

Do strong monitoring and evaluation systems and high levels of staff supervision make World Bank projects more effective?

2012-01-12T17:03:00.000-05:00

Severalweeks ago we released a short post announcing the release of a fresh dataset from the WorldBank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), containing assessments of almost 10,000 World Bankdevelopment projects. In that post, we examined some basic descriptivestatistics, breaking down project success by region and by year. Here we willdelve a bit deeper and explore the possible linkages between Quality of Monitoringand Evaluation (QME), the Quality of Project Supervision (QPS), and projectsuccess. “QPS” measures the intensityof staff oversight during project implementation, while “QME” assesses thecredibility of the project's performance indicators and data.

Toassess project success, we convert the IEG's six-point measure to a binaryvariable, with one adjustment from our previous post. Instead of assigningprojects rated by the Bank as 'moderately successful' to the satisfactory category, we assigned them tothe unsatisfactory category. Thisprocedure was undertaken to mitigate a potential upward bias in how the Bank evaluates its own projects.

TheQME variable is divided into four categories in the IEG dataset: high,substantial, moderate, and negligible. Over two-thirds of projects were ratedin the bottom two categories, indicating substantial room for improvement inQME. The graph provided below demonstratesa strong positive correlation between QME and project success.

Projectswith high QME ratings were successful 93% of the time, while projects withnegligible QME ratings were successful only 3% of the time. Further analysis mightshed light on the nature of this relationship. For example, it may be the casethat donors find it more difficult to create strong performance indicators andincrementally monitor project performance in countries with ineffectivegovernance or deficient infrastructure. And this may, in turn, affect projectperformance.

TheQPS indicator is measured on the same six point scale as the project outcomeindicator, so we perform a similar process to transform it into a binaryvariable. We classify projects rated 'highly successful' and 'successful' as satisfactory, while we classify projectsrated 'moderately successful', 'moderately unsuccessful', 'unsuccessful', and'highly unsuccessful' as unsatisfactory.Overall, projects received high scores on the QPS indicator: 75% of projectsqualified as satisfactory. This circle graph provided below compares (a) thenumber of cases in which a project's QPS score and final outcome measurecorresponded, with (b) the number of cases in which these two indicator valuesdisagreed.

Only 3% of projects with low levels of project supervision had a finaloutcome rating of 'satisfactory'. However, 27% of projects that received a 'satisfactory'rating on the QPS indicator received a final outcome rating of 'unsatisfactory'. This pattern suggests thateffective supervision is a necessary, but insufficient, predictor of projectsuccess.

A more thorough analysis is needed to determine the preciselinkages between the quality of monitoring and evaluation, the quality ofsupervision, and project success, but our preliminary results support thecurrent emphasis on strengthening monitoring and evaluation systems and improvingproject supervision.

This post was written by Ben Buch andDoug Nicholson. Ben and Doug are AidData Research Assistants at the College ofWilliam and Mary.

Transparency in South-South Cooperation: Why Does it Matter?

2012-01-11T08:30:00.000-05:00

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, Argentina'sPresident Cristina Fernandez,

Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, and Bolivia'sPresident Evo Morales look on

during the Community of Latin American andCaribbean States (CELAC) summit in Caracas.

Source:AP/ Ricardo Mazalan

"We have to create a new international system, and we're doing it…

The solution is in our hands. It's not in handouts from the North." –Hugo Chavez, 2009

The global development finance architecture is rapidly changing. Many low-income and middle-income countries andlongtime recipients of Western aid are now engaging in a different form ofdevelopment cooperation called "South-South cooperation." Broadlydefined, South-South cooperation is an arrangement in which developingcountries share knowledge, skills, expertise and resources to meet mutual development goals.

Venezuela, acountry known for promoting strong integration of Latin American and Caribbean countries,is an active sponsor of South-South development cooperation (SSDC) activities(see Chart 1). Its Ministry of Petroleum and Mining is one of the leadinginstitutional actors involved in SSDC activities. It oversees Petroleos deVenezuela SA (PDVSA), a state owned oil company which offers oil to Venezuela’s partnercountries on concessional terms and funds socialprograms.

Source: The Reality of Aid Management Committee,Special Report on SSC 2010

Venezuela also sponsors energy integration in LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, channeling significant amounts of oil-relatedassistance to governments through the Caracas Energy Cooperation Agreement, theEnergy Treaty of ALBA, and Petroamerica. These programs have helped Venezuela curry favor with governments in the region, but they have also made the Chávez administrationthe subject of intense criticism for its apparent lack of transparency.

Consider Nicaragua. In 2007, Nicaraguan PresidentDaniel Ortega decided that his government would join ALBA and Petrocaribe, a Petroamerica initiative. Through this arrangement, Nicaraguagains access to 27,000 barrels of oil per day, effectively getting half of itspurchase back in low-interest, long-term loans. Venezuelan aid through ALBAalso led to the creation of ALBA de Nicaragua SA (ALBANISA), a private companyin Nicaragua that manages joint revenues between PDVSA and Petroleos deNicaragua (PETRONIC). ALBANISA is not required to disclose its funds toNicaragua´s National Assembly; oversight rests solely with the executive branch. Thus, an estimated $450million in 2009 escaped public scrutiny.

Venezuela's unwillingness to disclose detailedfinancial information has aroused suspicions. TIME Magazine argues that the Ortega administration’s exclusive oversight of ALBANISA and ability to purchase private ownership of Nicaraguancompanies has increased opportunities for corruption and political patronage.

But others argue thatVenezuelan assistance, which may constitute as much as 50% of all officialfinancial flows received by the government, has played a major role in improving living conditions in Nicaragua'srural areas. Dr. Alejandro Martinez Cuenca, who runs a think tank in Managua, points out that extreme poverty in Nicaragua declined from17.2% in 2005 to 9.7% in 2009. He attributes this improvement to the fact that "the governmenthas had access to unlimited resources from Venezuela, and these have gonetoward the rural sector."

Transparency would, of course, give the Chávez administrationan opportunity to counter its critics. It would also help the researchcommunity better understand the rapidly evolving paradigm of South-South developmentcooperation. But for the time being it appears that the intended beneficiaries ofVenezuela's SSDC programs will be left to hold the Chávez administrationaccountable for results.

This post waswritten by Daniel Gamboa Galvez, a Visiting Research Associate at AidData, and JaclynGoldschmidt, an AidData Research Assistant.

Assessing Donor Transparency Practices Outside of the DAC

2011-12-08T12:19:00.001-05:00

As other FirstTranche contributors have noted,Publish What You Fund’s 2011 pilot Aid Transparency Index represents a major step forward in the benchmarking of donor transparency practices.But what is it exactly that PWYF has accomplished with this latest index?

I would argue that one of most importantcontributions PWYF has made is to move the policy discussion beyond the simplequestion of “What information is available?” and towards the more fundamentalquestion: “Is the information that shouldbe available actually available?”PWYF sheds light on the latter issue with detailed data for 58 organizationsfrom 45 countries/IGOs. Their assessment examines three dimensions of each donororganization: organizational, country and activity level. At each level, PWYFhas determined whether the organization collects and/or publishes commonlyavailable information items, such as policy documents, country strategies, and details on projectplanning, implementation and evaluation. The complete methodology is availablehere.

PWYF's pilot Index also draws our attention to anarea where there is tremendous scope for improvement: benchmarking thetransparency practices of development finance agencies outside of the OECD-DAC.PWYF and their CSO/university collaborators gathered data largely from DACagencies, but their methodological approach lends itself to inclusion ofnon-DAC agencies. In fact, some of the initial groundwork has already been laidby Michael Hubbard and Pranay Sinha at University of Birmingham. In their “Non DAC Donor’s Data Availability Index,” Hubbard and Sinha investigate the depth and quality of non-DAC data alreadyavailable from the AidData.org web portal. They also provide information aboutthe sources of the records published by AidData.

Hubbardand Sinha, “Non DAC Donor’s Data Availability Index”

Given that primary sources of information have beenidentified and a strong methodology for measurement is in place, the table isset for an industrious graduate student, junior faculty member, or CSO to begincollecting non-DAC data that are comparable with the (mostly) DAC data includedin the PWYF assessment.

My colleagues and I believe that including non-DAC developmentfinance agencies in future benchmarking exercises would be a great service tothe aid transparency policy discussion, as many of these countries (e.g. India, Mexico,and Russia)are currently establishing new agencies and working out how information will begathered and published for years to come. Including these organizations in benchmarkingassessments like PWYF’s 2011 Index would enable non-DAC agency leaders to tracktheir own progress. It might also foster a bit of healthy competition.

RobertMosolgo is an AidData Project Manager at the College of William and Mary. Heoversees AidData's work with non-DAC development finance agencies.

Mapping World Bank Project Success Patterns in Afghanistan: Does the Spatial Distribution of Violence Matter?

2011-12-05T17:22:00.001-05:00

“With networked research, all can help collectand share the data that is sorely lacking... We need more hands and minds toconfront theory with evidence on major policy issues. This is the directionthat I want the World Bank to take. This is democratizing developmenteconomics.”

-Robert Zoellick, Presidentof the World Bank Group,

speech delivered at Georgetown University, September 2010

B.K. Bangash / AP

The World Bank’s Open Data initiative hasdemonstrated—in spades—that universally accessible data can provoke newresearch questions and turn conventional wisdom on its head. However, for a variety of reasons, donors seldom release comparable project evaluation data. The scarcity of reliable project-levelevaluation data has created an important gap in the aid effectivenessliterature. While economists and political scientists have undertaken hundredsand hundreds of econometric studies to assess the impact of aggregate aid flowson various development outcomes, the research community still knows relativelylittle about the project-level determinants of successful donor-sponsored projects.

In a huge step forward for aid transparency, the World Bank'sIndependent Evaluation Group recently published its entire store ofapproximately 10,000 WB project evaluations from the 1960s to present. And importantly, the Bank’s unique project identificationsystem allows users to track individual database records back to projectdocuments.

Shortly after the Bank released these records, we geo-coded all ofthe World Bank’s publicly available project evaluation data in Afghanistansince the fall of the Taliban in 2001. By “mashing-up” these geo-coded data andother statistical sources, we may begin exploring the spatial determinants ofaid effectiveness in Afghanistan.

To conduct an initial "plausibility probe" of the popularhypothesis that security is a key determinant of successful projects, we overlaid all geo-coded and IEG-evaluatedWorld Bank projects from 2002-2007 with sub-national violence data from the Long War Journal.

The resulting map reveals a puzzling pattern. The spatialdistribution of violence and project performance do not correspond as closelyas one might expect. Conventional wisdom holds that aid projects are generallyless successful in conflict-affected areas. But this map suggests that many failed WorldBank projects actually cluster in the relatively less violent provinces north of Kabul. Additionally, this map callsattention to the fact that a fair number of World Bank projects succeed in the country'smost violent southern provinces, e.g. Kandahar and Helmand.

Several explanations may account forthis unusual pattern. Projects in the most dangerous provinces may receive a higherlevel of donor supervision (since they are located in areas where "thestakes are highest"), which previous research identifies as an importantpredictor of project success. It could alsobe the case that donor supervision is lowerin these areas, which makes it easier for local officials to avoidmicro-management from Western capitals and tailor projects to local needs andconditions.

The key point is that aid effectiveness scholarscannot answer a puzzling question like this one until they know it exists. Thisis why we have expressed great enthusiasm for the WorldBank's ambitious effort to "liberate" development data and promote"networked research". Finally, we should acknowledge that morecomprehensive, time-series data from alldonors in Afghanistan would provide amuch stronger empirical basis for systematic hypothesis testing. A recent pilotproject in Malawi strongly suggests that geocoding the universe of aid is feasiblewhen donors agree to disclose detailed project documentation. However, mobilizing the necessary politicalwill and capacity necessary to ensure that project evaluation documents are placed in the public domain will likely provefar more challenging. The latest Publish What You Fund benchmarking exercise demonstratesthat only a handful of donors receive high scores on evaluation disclosurepractices.

BrianO'Donnell is an AidData Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at the College of William andMary. Brad Parks is Co-Executive Director of AidData and Research Faculty atthe College of William and Mary.

Making Open Data Work for the Poor

2011-11-29T10:19:00.001-05:00

Shortly after the recent AidData/CCAPS/WBI event, the World Bank’s Shanta Devarajan reviewed four critiques of the open data movement. His summary is insightful and we commend it toreaders. Here we would like to push a few of his ideas a bitfurther. In particular, his third point — “there is limited evidence thatinformation improves outcomes” — deserves further consideration.

The evidence that open data leads to better outcomes isindeed limited and contradictory. For example, one innovative study found thatcommunity-level information dramatically improved health outcomes in Uganda,while a concurrent Indonesian study found that an informed public had little effect on perceived governmentcorruption.

Dr. Devarajan writes “the main reason for the paucity ofevidence on outcomes is that the underlying service delivery failure ispolitical, and it is difficult to disentangle the effects of information on thepolitical system.”

We agree. In many developing countries, domestic politicalbarriers likely "short-circuit" the relationship between betterinformation and better development outcomes. After all, how can informedcitizens get better development outcomes if their demands go unheard?

Two studies are under construction at AidData that will addressthis issue head-on. These randomized control trials will introduceinterventions that (1) solicit citizen feedback on development outcomes and (2)take the feedback directly to the desks of relevant policy-makers.

In the first experiment, we plan to test how well user-levelfeedback can improve a government’s delivery of needed services. In certaintreatment groups, the user-level feedback on service shortages will be sentdirectly to the government officials in charge of distribution. By comparingoutcomes from this group with the control-group results, we will see whetherdirect information delivery can significantly enhance outcomes. In the second study, user-level feedback on specificprojects will be sent directly to the donor-level project managers.

The purpose of these experiments is to learn whether, when,and how user-level information can be used to improve service delivery amongboth governments and donors. Our hope is that champions of the open datamovement will use – and expand on – our results to sharpen their strategies forusing user-level aid data.

Information is power, and it may improve development outcomes– if applied correctly. Political barriers are not insurmountable, butinnovative approaches to using open development data will be essential. Our latestwork will take several steps in this direction. We urge others, especially atthe user level, to take on this important question: How can we make open-sourcedata really work for the poor?

This post was written by Dan Nielson, an AidDataPrincipal Investigator and Director of the Political Economy and DevelopmentLab (PEDL) at Brigham Young University, and Dustin Homer, an AidData consultant.

Introducing AidData 2.0

2011-11-17T17:50:00.001-05:00

Today, AidData launched its new and improved website,featuring more content and new data and marking an expansion in the program’smission and scope. What began as a project to build a new kind of developmentassistance database has evolved into a broader initiative that aims to increasethe accessibility and relevance of development finance information for a widerange of stakeholders. The new website highlights innovative projects to findnew ways of gathering, managing, andvisualizing development finance information, such as geocoding andcrowdsourcing. Maps that show the geographical distribution of specificdonor-funded activities offer a powerful way to help decision makers andcitizens ask the right questions about aid allocation and effectiveness.

AidData Dashboards - coming soon

Those looking for data will find many new resources on theAidData site. AidData Raw is a new repository of stand-alone datasets that have not yet beenvetted for inclusion in the main AidData database. It includes geo-location,project evaluation, and non-DAC donor datasets, as well as links to theInternational Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) registry of aid activities.AidData 2.0 also includes a new collection of replication datasetsassociated with influential aid allocation and effectiveness studies, and many other new datasets for researchers. Soon, dashboards for key sectors will be added to the site, highlighting key trends and actors, and connecting activity-level data with other relevant resources.

Inaddition, the main AidData database has been updated to include the latest release ofthe OECD’s Creditor Reporting System data, and additional data sources, suchas:

· African Development Bank (2009-2010)

· African Development Fund (2008-2010)

· Arab Fund for Economic & Social Development (2007-2010)

· India (2005-2010, Ministry of Finance & Ministry of ExternalAffairs)

· Islamic Development Bank (1975-2008)

· Kuwait (2007-2009, Kuwait Fund for Economic Development)

· Latvia (2008-2010)

· Nigerian Trust Fund (2007-2010)

· Poland(2007-2010)

· SaudiArabia (2005-2009, Saudi Fund for Development)

· United Arab Emirates (2008-2010, Abu Dhabi Fund for Development)

The new website was first previewed at an event on Nov. 4, organizedby AidData, the World Bank Institute, and the Robert S. Strauss Center forInternational Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Putting Aid Data to Work: Using Better Information to Get Better Results was a day-long event that broughtpolicymakers, technologists, development practitioners, and researcherstogether to discuss the open data movement and how it is impacting developmentwork. In his keynote address, RichardManning—former chair of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee—set thecontext for the day’s discussions. He noted that the transparency agenda waslargely absent from the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness framework,but that then-President of the World Bank James Wolfensohn had emphasized it atthe 2003 Rome High Level Forum, and it has since reemerged as a majortheme. Mr. Manning argued that "infomediaries," such as AidData, will play a key role in making the deluge of public data moreaccessible and understandable.

Aleem Walji, World Bank

The discussion continued with a distinguished opening panel, including Catherine Weaver, Associate Professor, University of Texas andCCAPS Program as the moderator; and panelists Aleem Walji, Practice Manager,Innovation, World Bank Institute; Sheila Herrling, Vice President, Departmentof Policy and Evaluation, Millennium Challenge Corporation; David Wheeler,Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development; Lindsay Coates, Executive VicePresident, Interaction; and Jean-Louis Sarbib, Chief Executive Officer,Development Gateway.

Mr. Walji talked about the needfor “hyper-local” data—and that putting data in the public domain allowsoutsiders to find uses for it that the original institution may never haveconsidered. Demand for the data may not be obvious ex ante, but following theexample of Andrew Carnegie, he argued that “sometimes you have to build thelibraries before you build literacy.”

Ms. Herrling and Ms. Coates discussed the broad range ofstakeholders involved in making aid information more available, including donoragencies, legislatures, and civil society organizations. Dr. Wheeler gavepractical examples of lessons learned from projects that sought to increasetransparency, emphasizing that it is difficult toknow beforehand who the audience for the information will be, but that demandsurfaces during the process, and that project managers learn along the way howto adjust the project to meet the revealed needs of users. Mr. Sarbib concludedthe panel discussion by summarizing key challenges facing those who aim toincrease aid transparency: information needs to be complete, credible, andrelevant, and sustainability is key—institutions must modify their behavior,not simply pursue one-off transparency initiatives.

Panel: Tracking Aid

Sessions throughout the day focused on ways oftracking aid information, monitoring climate change-related finance, andclosing the feedback loop between donors and other aid stakeholders. A numberof fascinating new initiatives to make aid information more useful as a toolfor research, policymaking, and grassroots monitoring were demonstrated, andall presentations are available online, alongside the relevant speakerbios. A recording of the event will be posted online soon.

SteveDavenport and Brad Parks are the new Co-Executive Directors of AidData.

A fresh look at China as an aid donor

2011-11-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

Axel Dreher and Andreas Fuchs recently published an article titled, “Rogue Aid? The Determinants of China’s Aid Allocation,” as part of the “Foreign Aid of Emerging Donors and International Politics” project funded by the German Research Foundation. In their paper, Dreher and Fuchs use econometric methods to test whether China’s reputation as a “rogue donor” is consistent with actual patterns in Chinese aid flows. The dataset used in the paper is a synthesis of several existing sources of Chinese aid information, including AidData’s China dataset, which is a compilation of statistics from The China Commerce Yearbook (中国商务年鉴) and the Almanac of China’s Foreign Economic Relations & Trade (中国对外经济贸易年间).

Apart from sensitivity to political issues regarding Taiwan, the evidence suggests that Chinese aid is not overwhelmingly influenced by the country's commercial or political interests. Chinese aid allocation patterns seem to generally fall in line with the government’s non-interference policy. Dreher and Fuchs conclude that the use of the term “rogue aid”—see, for example, Moisès Naím's 2007 article in Foreign Policy magazine—to describe Chinese foreign aid is probably unwarranted. China, like DAC donors, uses aid to advance its strategic interests; however, it is more forthright about its policy that foreign assistance should benefit both the recipient country and the donor country.

The Dreher and Fuchs study also provides valuable information about trends in Chinese assistance; aid flows are tracked roughly from 1956 to 2006. Yet the authors admit that incomplete data limits the effectiveness of their study. They argue that greater transparency of aid flows (for more discussion of China and aid transparency, see a post from Monday on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog) would be beneficial to China, as it would help address concerns that China’s activities in the developing world are harmful.

This post was written by Austin Strange, a Research Assistant at the College of William and Mary.

Publish What You Fund Launches Pilot Aid Transparency Index

2011-11-15T16:08:00.001-05:00

Today, PublishWhat You Fund released its 2011 PilotAid Transparency Index. The index was developedwith the goal of encouraging a higher levelof transparency among aid donors. Fifty-eight donor agencies were ranked based on 37 different indicators. To compile the index, PublishWhat You Fund collected primary data on aid transparency levels, with supportfrom civil society organizations in 34 countries.

Theaverage score is 34%, while no donor scores above 78%,leaving the top quintile vacant. The 5 bestperforming donors are the World Bank, the Global Fund, the African DevelopmentBank, the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the UK’s Department forInternational Development. Some of the worst performing donors, among others,include Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.S. Treasury, Poland, Cyprus, China andGreece. The index indicates that the accessibilityof useful aid information is low. Interestingly, some of the donors that are traditionally considered to be transparencyleaders, such as Canada, New Zealand andNorway, received rather low scores.

Inits assessmentof the pilot index, Publish What You Fund concludes that greater aid transparency is an eminently achievable goal. Increased politicalcommitment to making information accessible and engagement with theInternational Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standards are listed among the key recommendations. In itspress release,Publish What You Fund calls on donors to improve their standing on transparencyand accountability and highlights the importance of such efforts for the effectiveuse of aid funds.

On Wednesday, Nov. 16, a launchevent will be held at the Overseas Development Institute in the UK (12:30-14:00,GMT+00) and streamed live online. You can also read about the index fromthe BBC, the FinancialTimes, and the Guardian.

Thispost was contributed by Alexey Dorofeev, an intern at Development Gateway.

Watch online – Friday, Nov. 4 – Putting Aid Data to Work: Using better information to get better results

2011-11-02T16:58:00.004-04:00

The AidData team has been working with partners at the World Bank Institute and the Climate Change and African Stability (CCAPS) program to put together a great all-day event on open data and development, which will be hosted by the World Bank on Friday, November 4. Richard Manning, former Chair of the OECD-DAC, will give the keynote address by video. Then, a series of panel discussions will examine the aid transparency movement and how it is influencing development research and practice. We’ll hear from officials at donor agencies who are working on making aid information more available, mashable, and relevant. We’ll also hear from researchers who are looking into new ways to use aid information to assess aid effectiveness and allocation, with a special focus on climate change issues. Experts from a range of civil society organizations will also talk about how better information can empower citizens to be more engaged in the development process.

Specific initiatives discussed will include a pilot project by AidData, CCAPS, and the World Bank Institute working with the Government of Malawi to track all active aid within one country using interactive maps. The event will also mark the launch of AidData 2.0, with a sneak preview of the new AidData website and a new direction for the AidData program that focuses on transparency, innovation, and country and donor solutions for aid effectiveness.

For more information, including the full agenda and link to the live webcast, please visit the event website. We’ll be tweeting from @aiddata during the event and welcome comments using the #aiddata hashtag.

Newly Released World Bank Dataset a Step Forward for Aid Transparency

2011-11-02T09:52:00.004-04:00

The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, responsible for monitoring the Bank’s activities, recently released a dataset containing evaluations of almost 10,000 World Bank projects since the early 1960s. This dataset presents a unique opportunity for researchers to examine the determinants of successful project implementation. The dataset includes a measure of the extent to which a project's major objectives were achieved. This indicator is measured on a six point scale, ranging from highly unsatisfactory to highly satisfactory. The dataset also includes measures of the extent to which the World Bank ensured quality at entry of the operation; the extent to which the World Bank supported effective implementation through appropriate supervision; the extent to which the borrower (including the government and implementing agency or agencies) ensured quality of preparation and implementation and complied with covenants and agreements; and the quality of monitoring and evaluation design, implementation, and utilization.

As a first step, we generated some basic descriptive statistics to gain a better understanding of overall trends in the data. We first converted all six point measures to binary variables: we re-categorized all projects as either “successful” (projects rated moderately satisfactory, satisfactory, or highly satisfactory) or “unsuccessful” (projects rated moderately unsatisfactory, unsatisfactory, or highly unsatisfactory).

After converting the data, we broke down project success by region. The regional groupings fall into three tiers.

Europe, East Asia, and Central Asia all have around 80% project success rates. Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia all have close to 75% success rates. Africa lags behind, with project success rates just above 60%. Future research might examine the source of this disparity between Africa and other regions. It would also be interesting to explore the linkages between country performance, World Bank monitoring and evaluation, and project success.

After analyzing the data by region, we also disaggregated project outcomes by the decade in which the project was initiated.

The decade with the highest percentage of satisfactory project outcomes was the 1960s, although we note that the sample size for this decade is much smaller. The success rate drops to around 75% in the 1970s and then again to about 67% in the 1980s. It recovers to around 75% in the 1990s, and increases again to near 80% in the 2000s. More sophisticated econometric techniques could shed some light on the causal mechanisms behind these shifts and whether they correspond to changes in World Bank lending practices. In particular, the sudden drop in World Bank lending effectiveness in the 1980s merits further examination.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing some more posts with additional analysis of these data. The World Bank's IEG should be commended for placing these data in the public domain. We are not aware of any other donor that has published such comprehensive project implementation and evaluation data.

This post was contributed by AidData research assistants Ben Buch (William and Mary '12) and Doug Nicholson (William and Mary '12).

Event Announcement, Oct. 3: Evaluation of the World Bank's Governance and Anti-Corruption Strategy

2011-09-28T18:45:00.006-04:00

On Monday, Oct. 3 (10 AM EST), Development Gateway will host a discussion with the author of a new report by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) on the World Bank’s governance and anti-corruption strategy.

The idea that well-governed countries are better able to foster economic opportunities, deliver services to the poor, and fight corruption became prominent among aid agencies in the 1990s. In 2007, the Bank’s governance and anticorruption (GAC) strategy reaffirmed its commitment to supporting country efforts to develop accountable and effective states. Entering its fourth year of implementation, the strategy seeks to increase the number of programs and projects addressing GAC issues.

The IEG study assesses the relevance and the effectiveness of the World Bank's 2007 strategy. A key feature is its benchmarking of the Bank’s country-level engagement on GAC issues, before and after the 2007 strategy. To improve performance, the study recommends a number of innovations: new financial instruments, better ways of measuring governance performance, a more harmonized and consistent approach to risk management, and a more strategic allocation of the World Bank’s internal resources.

Navin Girishankar, who led the study, will present its findings on whether the World Bank is contributing to good governance in developing countries, whether the strategy is making a difference, and the lessons learned for the broader development community.

To attend in person at Development Gateway's office (1889 F St, NW, 2nd Floor; Washington, DC 20006), please RSVP to ekallaur@developmentgateway.org by Friday, Sept. 30. Or, watch online--you can submit questions in advance or during the event to ekallaur@developmentgateway.org, or via tweet using the hashtag #GACEval.

Got transparency? Leaders and laggards in climate finance reporting

2011-09-26T13:57:00.003-04:00

The need for transparency in climate finance is plain: unless developing countries know how much money to expect, when and for what, they cannot effectively plan their efforts to address and respond to climate change. But what has been the track record of wealthy countries on this crucial issue?

A new scorecard reveals that we have a long way to go in making climate finance transparent. The authors from Brown University, the University of Zurich and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) evaluated the extent to which these countries meet a set of 25 common-sense transparency criteria in their climate finance reports to the UN. The scorecard can be found at: http://pubs.iied.org/pdfs/17100IIED.pdf.

Even the highest-scoring countries — Norway and Japan — barely reached a 50 percent score across the criteria evaluated. A look at how funds are being allocated reveals a murky and complicated underside to the commitments made two years ago in Copenhagen. There are grave concerns that funds previously promised or expected for basic needs such as health and education are being diverted for climate projects.

“Transparency is as important for taxpayers in the North as it is for climate-vulnerable countries in the South,” says Dr. Saleemul Huq, senior fellow in the climate change group at IIED. “Transparent reporting is essential to enable recipient countries to plan their responses to climate change and for civil society to hold governments to account on their promises.”

The authors call for an international registry of funds that provides comprehensive, detailed, consistent and transparent accounting and reporting measures at the project level. A transparent system, they argue, is essential to build much-needed trust and to jointly achieve the critical global goal to reduce emissions and protect those people most vulnerable to climate change.

J. Timmons Roberts is the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. David Ciplet is a PhD student at Brown University.

Using Remote Sensing Technologies to Monitor Aid's Impact

2011-09-21T20:54:00.006-04:00

Global climate change, deforestation, the growth of ethanol-based agricultural systems, and aquaculture expansion are all issues that are closely related to land use and land cover (LULC) change. LULC scientists study all aspects of land use and land cover change, including its determinants, its short-term and long-term consequences, and the process of change itself. Increasingly, LULC scientists also recognize that social science data can help shed light on many of these research questions. For example, the International Council for Science (ICSU) has established the Belmont Challenge, which seeks to integrate social science and LULC research in order to improve human adaptation to regional environmental change.

How can AidData contribute to future LULC research? It can help social and environmental scientists better understand aid's role as a possible driver of LULC change, and it can also help researchers assess the effects of assistance geared towards environmental protection and remediation.

It is widely accepted that developing countries demonstrate the highest level, rate, and intensity of land cover change. Many of these countries are of course also large aid recipients, with some countries relying on aid for as much as half of their total gross domestic income (GNI). Correlation should never be confused with causation, but the fact that a substantial amount of aid supports the agriculture, forestry, and fishery sectors (see Graph 1) raises several important questions: Does aid have a discernible effect on LULC change? If so, which types of aid have the greatest impact? Is there any evidence that environmental assistance has reduced deforestation? If so, which types of environmental aid are most effective?

Graph 1: Total aid commitments to the agriculture, forestry, and fishing sectors from 1975 to 2007. Source: AidData

At the moment, there is little research on the relationship between LULC change and aid flows. One exception is an article I recently published in the Journal of Land Use Science. In the article, I provide some tentative evidence of a relationship between international aid, shrimp farm expansion, and mangrove deforestation in coastal Ecuador. (See Figure 1 for an illustration of the conversion of an Ecuadorian mangrove estuary since the arrival of shrimp aquaculture.) Making a strong causal argument will ultimately depend upon the existence of foreign assistance data that is sub-nationally geo-referenced over a significant period of time.

Figure 1: The conversion of a mangrove estuary since the arrival of shrimp aquaculture. Chone Estuary, Ecuador. 1968 to 1991.

With time-varying, geo-coded information from AidData and LULC data, I believe that social and environmental scientists can tackle some of these previously unanswerable questions. The landsat program is widely agreed to be the first Earth Observing System (EOS) that allows for robust LULC analysis. AidData, with its similar temporal scale as landsat and considerable collection of sub-national data, makes aid information increasingly compatible with EOS. I expect that the integration of AidData and EOS will feature prominently in aid research over the next decade.

Stuart Hamilton is the Director of the Center for Geospatial Analysis at the College of William & Mary.

Tech@State: Data Visualization, this Friday

2011-09-21T13:33:00.004-04:00

This Friday, please join us for discussions of innovative data visualization techniques and their applications for international development research and practice. Tech@State: Data Visualization will be held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, but if you can't be there in person, it will also be streamed live on the internet.

Edward Tufte will get the discussions started with a keynote address on Policy and Technology. Other panelists will address the open data movement and how to leverage visualization techniques for planning, implementing, and monitoring aid projects. Breakout sessions will focus on key sectors and themes, including: data visualization to support disaster response and coordination; visualization for aid transparency; mobile technology and new media; and others. The full agenda and further details are available at http://tech.state.gov. You can also follow the discussions using the Twitter hashtag #techATstate.

The main event will be followed by an informal “unconference” on Sept. 24 (held at the Microsoft Innovation & Policy Center) to allow participants to brainstorm, network, and create their own agenda together.

Tech@State: Data Visualization is organized by the U.S. Department of State, AidData partners, and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), and is made possible through support from GFDRR, Fitzgerald Analytics, Esri, Microsoft, and MetroStar Systems. It is part of a series of Tech@State events, which bring together leaders, innovators, government personnel and others to collaborate on 21st century technology solutions to improve the education, health and welfare of the world's population.

New Report on Chinese Aid Transparency Expresses Cautious Optimism

2011-09-20T18:52:00.005-04:00

The Transparency of Chinese Aid: An Analysis of The Published Information on Chinese External Financial Flows is a newly released report that examines the information that is currently available on Chinese assistance to developing countries. Co-published by Publish What You Fund and the Centre for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University, the report outlines how Chinese aid reporting differs from Western methods and assesses the prospects for improving the transparency of China's foreign assistance.

Lead author Sven Grimm and a team of co-authors explore the fragmented state of Chinese aid information by cataloguing the materials published by each Chinese government entity involved with foreign aid. In April 2011, the State Council, China’s highest executive body, published China’s Foreign Aid, an official white paper that provides aggregate figures on China’s foreign aid as well as data on aid distribution by industry, region, and level of income. However, the white paper does not disclose records for individual recipient countries or projects. Other data on grants and interest-free loans are available through The China Statistical Yearbook (Almanac of China’ s Foreign Economic Relations and Trade; 中国对外经济贸易年间), and China Eximbank annual reports are accessible on the Eximbank’s website. But neither of these contain country-level data. Patchy information is available through press releases, policy speeches and news reports, but as Grimm and his colleagues point out, such sources are only small pieces of China’s intricate aid puzzle. Moreover, no data are publicly available about success rates for any of China’s aid projects, and there are few if any project evaluations, audits and assessments in the public domain. It is therefore not entirely surprising that Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Fu Ziying recently reported, “China has not found a single case of corruption in its aid projects to foreign countries during the past six decades.”

China’s activities as a donor country confound the existing set of global aid reporting standards. Whereas Chinese aid figures include military assistance and subsidized loans for joint-venture projects, OECD-DAC calculations do not include these contributions. And while DAC members report things such as debt relief and costs of foreign students studying in donor countries, China does not. One must also remember that Chinese notions of "aid" are borne out of cultural, political and economic institutions different from those that form Western aid paradigms. Deborah Bräutigam's insightful book, The Dragon’s Gift, addresses this issue at some length.

Despite these measurement challenges, Grimm and his coauthors suggest that more data on Chinese aid are available than many perceive, and that Chinese officials may have incentives to make their aid more transparent and consistent with Western aid practices. They also acknowledge several possible impediments to transparency, including domestic criticism of foreign aid and resistance towards Western pressure for conformity with traditional international aid norms.

Ultimately, the authors of this report strike a cautiously optimistic tone. They note that China has stepped up its engagement with the OECD-DAC, the World Bank, and other members of the international aid community. They also suggest that the upcoming Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF-4) in Busan, South Korea will raise the profile of South-South cooperation and focus attention on Chinese assistance. As many readers of The First Tranche know, AidData collected and published one of the only publicly available project-level datasets of Chinese aid, and we are eager to expand and enhance the data. Stay tuned to The First Tranche for updates.

Austin Strange is a Research Assistant at the College of William and Mary.

A spatial perspective on World Bank health projects in India

2011-08-29T09:24:00.008-04:00

As part of a team of summer interns at Development Gateway, I geo-mapped multilateral development projects to help assess aid effectiveness and donor coordination. A similar effort by a team of interns last year led to the successful launch of the World Bank Mapping for Results (MfR) platform, making the World Bank sub-national project information accessible to the public at large. Since then, the World Bank’s Open Data Initiative has launched a new portal for financial information and supported the Kenya Open Data Initiative for sub-national recipient country budget data. In a short time, mapping of development projects has emerged as a new way to increase transparency and accountability in the international development world, and has been included as a part of the IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) standard. Several development organizations have followed suit and agreed to make geographic project information public. I decided to use my internship opportunity to analyze the World Bank’s health and social service projects in India to see if I could discern any patterns. The results were interesting.

India is a significant recipient of IDA (International Development Association) loans and the data for active project locations were readily available at the World Bank MfR website. I obtained sub-national development indicators from Indian district level health surveys (DLHS), and using a basic geo-mapping program (www.geocommons.com), available for free online, overlaid them on the World Bank active health project locations. The percentage of fully immunized children at the district level was the first development indicator I used. The dots represent the location of the World Bank projects, with the size of each dot signifying the amount of aid. For Figure 1, the lighter regions on the map, belonging to lower quartiles, indicate low rates of child immunization.

Figure 1: Percentage of Fully Immunized Children (District Level)

As soon as I mapped the data a clear pattern emerged. The districts in the northern regions were lagging behind in terms of immunization. When I mapped the next indicator, percentage of district level population living at a low standard of living, a similar pattern was visible: many regions with low immunization rates had a high prevalence of populations with a low standard of living (Figure 2). (I reviewed the same indicators from a similar survey conducted 5 years prior. Though development indicators had improved in some regions over time, I could clearly identify regions that were continuously lagging behind.)

The next step for this analysis was to overlay the locations of World Bank project activities on these indicator layers. For Figure 2, darker regions or regions in higher quartiles, indicate a high percentage of the district population qualified as having a low standard of living.

Figure 2: Percentage of Population with a Low Standard of Living

In the map of district immunization rates (Figure 1), the active World Bank projects cover the Northern districts in the second lowest quartile, but districts in the bottom quartile (lowest immunization rate and lightest shade) in adjoining regions have no active World Bank projects. On the other hand, there are projects in the Southern states, like Tamil Nadu, which fall in the third and fourth quartile (high rates of immunization). The map with the standard of living indicator (Figure 2) presents a slightly different picture. The World Bank active projects cover the majority of Northern districts in the quartile with the highest percentage of the population belonging to the low standard of living category (the darkest region).

This initial analysis therefore suggests several interesting questions for researchers How effective is the targeting of these projects? If the projects were mapped alongside a different set of indicators, rather than these two, what sort of picture would emerge? What if we looked at the trends in key indicators over time, relative to the start/end date of these projects, rather than a simple snapshot? Geo-enabling aid activity information makes this kind of spatial analysis much more feasible.

Anustubh Agnihotri is a graduate student at the University of Texas.

Food for thought?

2011-08-25T10:19:00.004-04:00

Around the world, rising food prices have forced millions of people back into poverty, spurring political unrest and complicating the global economic recovery. Now, the tragedy unfolding in the Horn of Africa has once again put a spotlight on questions related to food security. One longstanding question is how donors should address the tension between meeting urgent humanitarian needs in times of acute food insecurity versus long-term investments in agricultural productivity. Food aid and short-term safety net programs save lives, but do not solve the root causes of chronic food insecurity.

Rather than attempting to address these complicated issues head-on, in this post we take a look at the data to tease out some of the trends in development assistance. How have donors actually responded to the shifting thinking on augricultural aid in recent years? Meanwhile, what has happened in real food production? Justin Gillis, blogging for the New York Times, mentions some key points from recent thinking and debates, and also references the report from the G8 summit in Deauville, France, which indicated that bilateral aid to agriculture increased by 13% per year (on average) from 2003-08.

Here, we use the AidData database to get a sense of trends (aid categories included are Agriculture, Forestry, and Fishing, and Development Aid/Food Security). The following graphs show G8 commitments from 2003-08 (except Russia, which had not reported data to the CRS or to AidData).

As the first graph below indicates, total aid for agricultural development has indeed increased, while spending on food security has remained relatively flat.

Looking at the spending on food security by region, we see that Asia has received a declining share of total food security aid, while the share to Sub-Saharan Africa has increased over the period shown.

The distribution of agricultural aid (which, again, has been increasing in absolute terms) shows less of a pattern—it has shrunk dramatically in East Asia, and bounced around in other regions, with Sub-Saharan Africa generally receiving around 20-30% of total agricultural aid.

We also looked at UN Food and Agricultural Organization data on overall global food production, and from what we saw, the trends are encouraging. After accounting for population data, which we got from the World Bank, we found that per capita agricultural yield is up, including dramatic increases in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has increased food production nearly 24% since 2000.

The growth in food production could be a sign that the renaissance of agricultural aid (after the post-Integrated Rural Development-era pessimism) is enjoying some success. But despite these positive trends, the global food crisis continues, and climate change severely undermines prospects for increasing food production. According to the World Bank’s Hunger Clock, more than 900 million people are undernourished, and the number continues to tick upward.

This post was contributed by Kedar Pavgi and Reggie Gomez, William and Mary '11, both former AidData research assistants.

AfDB Geocoded Data Set Now Publicly Available

2011-08-15T11:51:00.006-04:00

At its annual meetings in Lisbon, Portugal (June 9-10), the African Development Bank and AidData announced the launch of an interactive map of AfDB project activities in Cameroon, Morocco, and Tanzania. As part of the launch, the underlying data sets for these countries were also made public, demonstrating the AfDB’s commitment to transparency as an IATI signatory.

Today, the geocoded locations of all AfDB projects continent-wide approved from 2009-2010 are being made available at open.aiddata.org. The data include more than $10 billion in AfDB Group funding to 43 African countries. In total, AidData’s researchers, in partnership with AfDB project managers, were able to identify nearly 2,000 sub-national locations from the 183 AfDB projects. Using these data, stakeholders can view the precise locations of schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and other bank-financed activities.

The geocoded data is also fully compatible with the IATI geocoding standard and World Bank/AidData Mapping for Results data, also available from open.aiddata.org and maps.worldbank.org so researchers and analysts can mash the data up to examine donor coordination, sub-national aid targeting, and many other questions. It is exciting to see donors begin mapping their data to provide a clearer picture of the distribution of aid resources within countries, ultimately improving the impact of aid on the ground.

This post was contributed by Joshua Powell, Development Gateway

Experimenting with Aid Information

2011-06-27T09:34:00.011-04:00

Randomized controlled trials have garnered increasing attention in the development community, particularly with the high-profile work of economists Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and their colleagues at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Randomized controlled trials provide a method of research to social scientists that allows for the isolation of causal mechanisms while minimizing risks to human subjects (Green and Gerber 2003). This summer, a group of 15 students from BYU will be travelling to Uganda to work as research assistants on a randomized controlled trial led by AidData principal investigators Michael Findley and Daniel Nielson. We will be studying how to improve the transparency and effectiveness of the aid sector in Uganda. I will be joining the group as a representative of the College of William and Mary.

Of the roughly $150 billion in foreign aid committed to developing countries annually, studies suggest that it is often the case that a relatively small portion of this money actually reaches the intended beneficiaries. Often, a large portion of the diverted money is lost to corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency (Svensson 2000, Knack 2001). Of the money that does reach the right hands, it often ends in unsustainable projects that do not produce the intended results due to inefficiencies or project abandonment, or other factors.

Breakdowns in the service provider-recipient relationship contribute to the capture of foreign aid funds by corrupt officials and bureaucratic inefficiencies. One problem occurs in information provision. It is not a lack of information driving this breakdown, but a failure to centralize these sources in a useful way. Studies have suggested that individuals and organizations with access to useful information are far more likely to play an effective oversight role (Miller 2005, Gordon and Huber 2002). Often times, the most useful information regarding where aid is needed and whether aid dollars are being spent effectively is held by citizens in developing countries. However, these citizens generally lack the tools and access needed to provide direct feedback on project status or impact.

Our project this summer will investigate the use of crowdsourcing to solve this information breakdown. Crowdsourcing refers to leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to answer a question or solve a problem that would traditionally be posed to a specific actor. For example, in the business world, companies may use crowdsourcing to poll consumers to name a new product. AidData will be partnering with UNICEF and Ushahidi to run a randomized controlled trial in Uganda to test which incentive mechanisms (e.g. reimbursement, social networks, public praise, immediate feedback, and entry into a lottery providing prizes to the winners) are most effective in recruiting Ugandan citizens to provide useful information on development needs and outcomes. The application of incentive mechanisms will be randomized across districts in Uganda, so that results can be compared against control districts to isolate the effect of the treatment. This randomized controlled trial will provide insight into the causal mechanisms that drive improvement in the effectiveness of foreign aid provision, and I am excited to have the opportunity to work on the project.

Alena Stern ’12 is an AidData research assistant at the College of William and Mary

Where does aid go? Mapping the African Development Bank’s Activities

2011-06-14T17:24:00.006-04:00

More news for those who like their data served up on beautiful maps. AidData has been working with the African Development Bank (AfDB) to map the Bank's activities on the continent. You can check out the results so far with this map, created with support from Esri. The Bank launched it at their Annual Meetings last week in Lisbon, where it also reaffirmed its commitment to increasing the transparency of its work.

The map shows the AfDB's ongoing operations in three countries: Cameroon, Morocco, and Tanzania. This represents a subset of the more than 2,000 activities financed since 2009, and represents newly geocoded project data (in addition to the AfDB projects that were coded last summer as part of the Mapping for Results partnership with the World Bank, which can be seen through the Development Loop app). With the map, you can zoom in on each country and explore the Bank’s activities by sector, against underlying maps of key development indicators by subnational region (including poverty, malnutrition, and infant mortality rates).

To create the map, AidData researchers identified the latitude and longitude of the location(s) where each project is being implemented, using the geocoding methodology developed jointly with Uppsala University in Sweden.

Launch of the Make Aid Transparent Campaign

2011-06-14T09:53:00.004-04:00

A coalition of over 60 civil society groups from over 25 countries launched the Make Aid Transparent campaign last week. The campaign calls on governments and other aid donors to publish more and better information on aid.

At the centre of the campaign, whose members include Oxfam, Save the Children, ONE, and around 30 groups from developing countries, is a petition asking governments to make their aid more transparent and an animation which explains why they should do so.

Amy Barry, Campaigns Director at Publish What You Fund, said: “Governments have promised to make their aid more transparent but so far they haven’t done enough. At the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness at the end of the year their promises will be tested. This campaign will demonstrate public demand for aid transparency from citizens in both donor and recipient countries.”

The first petition handover is envisaged for early July in Paris, at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Other activities and actions will take place through the year, with the campaign culminating at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea from November 29 – December 1.

Thanks to Claudia Elliot from Publish What You Fund for this post. To sign the petition, click here.

China’s foreign aid white paper: a victory for the aid transparency movement?

2011-05-31T23:57:00.007-04:00

Chinese foreign aid has long been a subject of scrutiny and controversy. It doesn’t easily fit into the OECD’s definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA). Much is financed through the China Eximbank in the form of concessional loans that directly support Chinese economic interests, and carried out by embassies and consulates rather than development agencies. Most importantly, project-level data on Chinese aid is essentially non-existent (or, if it exists, the government is not sharing it with the rest of the world). As a result, scholars, policy-makers, and aid workers have agonized over the true nature of Chinese development assistance – whether it really helps recipient nations develop, or simply feeds China’s appetite for extractive resources (read Deb Brautigam’s blog for more discussion of the myths and realities behind Chinese aid).

AidData’s experience exemplifies the difficulty of locating comprehensive data on Chinese aid flows. By scraping the China Commerce Yearbook and the Almanac of China’s Foreign Economic Relations & Trade, published annually by China’s Ministry of Commerce, BYU professor Dan Nielson and his students were able to obtain project-level data for “comprehensive projects completed” between 1990 and 2005 (see a summary of the project and download the data here). However, a significant amount of project-level data is missing, including commitment amounts for most projects.

This is why I was surprised when, on Thursday, April 21^st, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provided a rare glimpse into the mechanics and history of its aid program, releasing a white paper summarizing its foreign aid activities since 1950. Why now? What is the motivation behind this sudden effort to 'set the record straight'?

One possible explanation is that the PRC “is learning the limitations of noninterference." Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt and Andrew Small argue in a 2008 Foreign Affairs article that as its international diaspora and foreign investments have expanded, “China has had to devise a more sophisticated approach to protecting its assets and its citizens abroad,” and has therefore taken a more active role in denouncing states that violate human rights (e.g. North Korea, Sudan, and Burma). Esther Pan of the Council on Foreign Relations also calls attention to the fact that the Chinese government has invested more heavily in its soft power, i.e. its ability to influence “by persuasion and appeal rather than by threats or military force.”

The effectiveness of China's foreign assistance is likely correlated with the country’s ability to exercise soft power. When critics charge that Chinese contractors do “shoddy work," or that Chinese aid robs developing countries of natural resources without providing jobs in return, the country's reputation suffers.

A quick scan of the PRC's white paper suggests that the government is mindful of these criticisms and wants to reframe the discussion. It draws attention to the mutually beneficial nature of its support and positions China as a “friend” of developing nations that engages in "South-South cooperation." According to the paper, China’s inexpensive loans have helped nations “build up their self-development capacity” and “foster local personnel and technical forces.” The paper also tries to lower expectations by emphasizing the fact that it remains a developing country with constrained resources and significant domestic challenges: “Over the years, while focusing on its own development, China has been providing aid to the best of its ability to other developing countries with economic difficulties.”

China’s white paper also attempts to dispel myths about the type of aid it actually provides. For example, whereas China’s investment in energy and resource extraction has drawn considerable criticism, the paper asserts that the majority of Chinese concessional loans (61%) support “economic infrastructure,” and only 8.9% of its loans support “energy and resources development.” China has also funded clean energy initiatives and trained over 1,400 people in developing countries on how to develop and use renewable resources.

According to the white paper, the majority of China’s development financing through concessional loans has targeted economic infrastructure, as opposed to energy and resources development (see page 5).

The one criticism the paper fails to address, as the Guardian points out, is the Chinese government’s lack of transparency. The paper provides some aggregate funding statistics, but it does not provide the granular project-level detail necessary to monitor the nature of the country’s specific development assistance activities. Nor does it define how China categorizes aid projects, which makes it virtually impossible to know what types of activities fall under each sector indicated in the report. To verify any data presented in the white paper, one would need detailed sector descriptions and project documents that clearly describe goals, activities funded, financial details, financing and implementing organizations, and other fields for each project (Publish What You Fund uses seven AidData fields to assess the quality of donor data – see page 67 of their 2010 Aid Transparency Assessment).

Releasing the project-level data that would enable independent evaluators to assess the nature and impact of Chinese foreign assistance would be a great next step.

Peter Bergen is a former AidData Research Assistant. He graduated from the College of William and Mary with a BA in international relations in May 2010.

Supply vs. Demand in Aid Transparency and Accountability

2011-05-20T07:59:00.003-04:00

This week, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative released their new website, along with a report on transparency and accountability in development assistance. The report, entitled “Donor aid: new frontiers in Transparency and Accountability,” assesses progress made by donors in supplying information on their development aid flows, and calls for increased “demand” for aid information on behalf of recipient governments. The breadth of the report is impressive, covering where aid transparency has been, where it is now, and where it needs to go in the future.

According to the report, a lack of transparency and accountability causes three types of problems: efficiency (funds get lost through corruption and inefficiency), effectiveness (donors can’t coordinate, recipients can’t plan ahead, and beneficiaries can’t give feedback), and empowerment (intended beneficiaries can’t play a role in the development process). These problems are well-known, and donors and international initiatives have tried to tackle them since the 2005 Paris High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.

But progress has been slow, says the report, due to the lack of coordination between the “supply” and “demand” sides of aid information. Whereas donors have increasingly taken the initiative to supply aid information, there are few forums that bring together actors from both the North and the South to independently evaluate donors based on the data they provide. “Transparency is ultimately about relationships,” says the report. Donors can provide as much aid data as they see fit, “but effective transparency also requires demand, in the form of effective CSOs, parliaments, researchers etc. making use of the information provided” (p. 15). Claudia Schwegmann reinforces this point in a recent blog post on the failure of transparency in farm subsidies to convert into policy change.

According to the report, this is why initiatives like Reality of Aid (ROA) are so important – they use published aid information to assess donor performance (see, for example, ROA’s annual report). Linking supply and demand for aid information is also AidData’s primary motivation for creating the Development Loop application, a prototype tool that provides community beneficiaries a convenient way to give direct feedback on development aid projects.

But, as the report emphasizes, there are still many missing pieces, including civil society initiatives, particularly in the South, that know how to use open data to their advantage and governing bodies that take feedback seriously. According to Schwegmann, only a fraction of any population will be interested in providing feedback on open data, which requires significant time and energy. Any feedback given needs to be efficient and understandable, and it needs to reach decision-makers who are incentivized to take action. Crowdsourcing platforms like Ushahidi are a great way to collect and aggregate information, but policy-makers need to be receptive to the data they receive – they need to institutionalize feedback in their policy-making procedures.

It is important to recognize the significant constraints that donors face in making their data public, which the report carefully outlines on pages 25-26. But the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) offers real hope for concrete progress on these issues. Because IATI has incorporated input from donor agencies, recipient governments, civil society organizations, foundations, and research initiatives, its aid reporting standard appeals to a multi-stakeholder base. With a common standard for aid information reporting that is useful for all types of end users, paired with timely, comprehensive data from donors, we may eventually see a stronger connection between the “supply” of transparency and the “demand” for accountability.

Open Data for Development Camp highlights challenges and innovations in aid transparency

2011-05-18T08:29:00.003-04:00

From May 12-13, AidData's Anna Lauridsen attended the Open Data for Development Camp (ODDC) in Amsterdam. The camp, hosted by Open for Change, allowed participants from the development and technology fields to discuss challenges, benefits, and lessons learned associated with open data.

The camp proved to be a fantastic forum for discussion of practical issues in institutionalizing open data practices. Participants generally agreed that open development data should be a core component of a paradigm shift towards increased transparency, accountability, and public participation in development practice. However, many organizations are facing legal and financial hurdles in bringing sensitive data to the public – several delegates, for example, expressed concern that data would be “misused." Christian Kreutz of the Open Knowledge Foundation highlighted the benefits of open data and geo-mapping for citizen participation, but also urged consideration of privacy issues before making certain data public. Others echoed the Italian government’s concerns about the cost of implementing open data initiatives.

These concerns do not preclude donors' ability to implement open data initiatives – rather they indicate donors’ willingness to discuss the full risks and benefits of these initiatives. As the recent ONE Data report pointed out, “buy-in and agreement [on open data] appear to be increasing in the run-up to the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.” According to Publish What You Fund, donors should be wary of falling behind on their commitments to initiatives like the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) if they want to be taken seriously at this important forum.

Beyond challenges and difficulties, delegates to ODDC also presented exciting new open data initiatives. Akvo, for example, announced a pilot project with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to visualize part of its portfolio of aid projects online in IATI standard format (Pieter Dorst, director of aid coordination at the Dutch MFA, confirmed his government’s commitment to IATI in an interview with Akvo last Thursday). The World Bank announced a new knowledge partnership on ICT, through which they will invite technology start-ups, developers, think-tanks, and academics to partner with the WB in using ICT to empower citizens in developing countries. Anna Lauridsen presented the AidData experience geo-coding development aid projects.

Those interested in open data issues beyond the international development arena may be interested in an upcoming event: the Open Knowledge Foundation’s annual conference, to be held from June 30-July 1, 2011.

Open for Change is the Dutch Network for transparency, collaboration, and impact in development. It is a joint effort of numerous Dutch organizations, and hosted by Partos, the Dutch association of private international aid organizations. The Open Data for Development Camp was organized by Open for Change under the auspices of Partos and in cooperation with the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, KIT, TexttoChange, Hivos, Oxfam Novib, and ICCO.

U.S. Foreign Aid to Pakistan: In Perspective

2011-05-16T10:12:00.010-04:00

Note: A version of this article was originally posted on May 11th. Due to technical issues with blogger.com, this article is a repeat of that posted last week.

In the wake of the recent discovery of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a “wide range of powerful lawmakers” are debating whether continued US foreign assistance to a so-called “unreliable ally” like Pakistan is appropriate (Politico). Several notable members of Congress have threatened major cuts to the billions of foreign aid slated for Pakistan in the coming years.

Responding to this sudden backlash, Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development explains that the debate “misunderstands the purpose of development assistance” and that cutting aid to Pakistan could have irreparable international consequences. She posits that “aid cannot buy leverage” and that US aid instead promotes Pakistani stability and regional security.

Whether or not aid really can be used as “leverage,” US policymakers will be considering the future of Pakistan-bound aid in coming weeks. Congressman Ted Poe (R-Texas) introduced the “Pakistan Foreign Aid Accountability Act” last week, which “prohibit[s] any foreign aid from being sent to Pakistan until it can demonstrate that it had no knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.” At face value, these measures may seem logical, but they fail to account for the potential repercussions of halting Pakistani aid. Moreover, clear information on the types and amounts of aid given by the US to Pakistan has been notably absent from public discourse.

Estimates put the total US aid figure – including both military and development aid – around $20 billion since 9/11. Now, both military and economic aid may end up on the Congressional chopping block. While the AidData database does not include information on military aid (see a summary here), it provides a helpful snapshot of the development assistance allocated to Pakistan over the last decade. Actually, the US has provided a total of just over $4 billion in non-military development assistance between 2001 and 2008. For comparison, Egypt, another strategic US ally, received about $3.6 billion in development aid over the same period. India, Pakistan’s neighbor and main regional competitor, garnered just over $1 billion in US assistance. Here’s a look at US development aid to Pakistan sector-by-sector:

We see that a large portion of this aid – roughly $0.75 billion – has gone toward governance and civil-society-building initiatives. Nearly a third of the aid has helped Pakistan service its large debts. And almost half a billion dollars have gone to improve education, with similar amounts directed toward health and humanitarian relief. Considering Pakistan’s recent history of instability, the apparent US prioritization of democracy/governance-building and education initiatives seems especially appropriate. As Dr. Birdsall suggests, ending this kind of stability-enhancing assistance could be very detrimental for Pakistan, the region, and the world at large.

So, the question arises, will US lawmakers make important aid decisions without sufficient information? It is critical for US citizens and policymakers to understand the nature of development assistance being sent to Pakistan before making major judgments, with potentially far-reaching consequences, about the future of such aid. Good data coupled with good analysis (like an upcoming CGD report described here) are the real key to better policies for US aid to Pakistan.

Dustin Homer, a former AidData researcher, is a project manager at BYU’s Political Economy and Development Lab.

Emerging Economies Press for Continued Access to Coal Financing at the World Bank

2011-04-25T00:42:00.000-04:00

This post is written by Mark Buntaine (Duke University and the College of William and Mary). Mark is a PI on several AidData Research Projects.

A dispute is brewing at the World Bank that is likely to reveal the outlines of development assistance in the coming decade. That dispute is over the energy source that supplies much of the world’s power – coal. The World Bank is in the process of developing a new Energy Sector Strategy, which will establish lending priorities and project guidelines in its energy sector investments. As Lisa Frieman reports in a recent New York Times article, a discussion paper circulated for a World Bank meeting between country representatives recommended that financing for coal-based power be limited to the world’s poorest countries, leaving middle-income countries behind.

Representatives from some of the world’s fastest emerging economies, including China and Brazil, have objected vigorously. Similar to negotiations that have played out under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, representatives from these emerging economies argue that climate change is the legacy of industrialized countries, and that it is unfair to limit their growth when industrialized countries continue to have higher per capita emissions. While this larger dispute over the responsibility for addressing climate change is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, decisions about the future of energy sector lending at the World Bank will.

Most World Bank observers maintain that the US and other industrialized countries exert substantial influence in steering lending to preferred countries and sectors. Under the Obama administration, the US has made it official policy to oppose coal-based power lending at the multilateral development banks. Despite this policy, lending for coal-based power projects at the World Bank has actually increased in recent years according to the AidData database, after falling sharply in the early-2000s, as displayed below. The highly-controversial $3.75 billion loan for the Medupi coal-fired power station in South Africa was also approved in 2010, the largest loan in the history of the World Bank.

The recent uptick in coal-based power lending might indicate that donor countries like the US no longer exert the influence at the World Bank that they once had. Instead, middle-income countries are increasingly making their voices heard and challenging the donor-driven model of development finance. If in the coming weeks they are able to successfully beat back restrictions on energy sector lending, we will have witnessed a fundamental power shift at the multilateral development banks.

Donor countries have driven improvements to environmental practices at the MDBs over the past two decades. Environmental NGOs have typically sought to influence environmental practices at the MDBs by getting donor countries to support their policy preferences. In the future, they may have to look more widely for support.

Time for some mashups: World Bank and AidData released geographic data for 81 countries and launch open.aiddata.org

2011-04-18T21:03:00.012-04:00

The World Bank has just released maps of its activities in 81 countries as part of the Mapping for Results initiative, a partnership between the Bank and AidData. The geocoded data represent more than 16,000 locations for more than 2,700 active Bank activities in all 79 IDA countries, plus China and the Philippines. The Mapping for Results initiative is part of the World Bank Open Data Initiative and is fully committed to open, free and easy access to raw data. The socioeconomic and geographic location data displayed on the Mapping for Results platform can be downloaded, expanded, manipulated, and re-used without restriction. All of the geographic location data can also be accessed through the World Bank Open Data API.

Today, AidData in partnership with the World Bank Institute launched open.aiddata.org, a new toolkit for aid transparency with tools and data for donor organizations that want to make information on their activities more accessible, and for those who want to better understand and access aid information. At Open.AidData you can download the Geocoding Methodology behind the mapped data, which can be used by other organizations that want to geo-enable their work.

The Mapping for Results dataset is the output of nearly one year of collaboration between AidData and the World Bank Institute—but this is only the beginning. We are working together to expand the initiative to other organizations, with the goal of helping donors to better coordinate their country strategies and governments to harmonize on- and off-budget aid-funded activities. At the country level, we are looking for new ways to make this information more accessible and relevant to governments and citizens.

Mapping can advance the development agenda in a number of ways:

· Aid maps can help citizens and CSOs monitor and give feedback on aid activities in their communities or sectors of interest

· Maps are a strong visual aid that facilitate decision making between donors and partner countries on where and how to allocate development investment

· Overlaying aid information with development statistics helps development stakeholders assess whether aid flows to areas of greatest need

· Development actors can use maps to coordinate activities, thus preventing duplication of work.

Currently, AidData is using the Mapping for Results data to develop new web/mobile applications (such as Development Loop, with Esri) and to inform new research in aid allocation, donor coordination, and impact monitoring. More eyes on project implementation at the local level is likely to mean that a larger share of funding makes it to the intended destination and is used productively. This “Democratization of development through open data” can broaden the dialogue so that citizens have a voice in the development planning process, and can report back on whether roads are maintained or schools have textbooks. AidData, Ushahidi, and UNICEF are currently exploring the feasibility of testing a crowdsourcing approach to development monitoring in Uganda, with technical support from the World Bank Institute.

AidData is also working with the Climate Change and African Political Stability Program (CCAPS) at the University of Texas and Malawi's Ministry of Finance to geocode aid activity information at the country level. Recently, several CCAPS research assistants traveled to Malawi for the initial stages of the project, which will result in a geocoded set of all development assistance projects currently tracked in the government's Aid Management Platform (AMP). Once mapped, Malawi's geocoded aid projects will be presented on a simple visual platform that will help government and donor staff ensure that aid is targeted to areas of greatest need.

Our hope is that more transparent, better data will lead to greater development impact. Look forward to seeing how others take the newly released data and mash it up with other kinds of information to pose (and answer?) some interesting questions.

Bangladesh: Mapping climate change and food security

2011-04-14T15:07:00.016-04:00

This post, co-written by Molly Norris of the World Bank and Joshua Powell of AidData, is cross-listed from blogs.worldbank.org and shows a few ways to use geo-coded aid activity information:

Bangladesh can be described as “ground zero” at the intersection of climate change and food security.

The country is widely recognized as one of the places most vulnerable to the effects of a changing climate, which strains food systems alongside rapidly growing and urbanizing populations. Yet, despite these dual challenges, the World Bank expects Bangladesh will meet its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015.

Given the impact of the global food crisis and numerous natural disasters, how is Bangladesh managing this feat? And can we map the country’s progress?

Questions like these are being tackled by an expanded Mapping for Results initiative that allows mash-ups between development indicators and project locations. AidData, a joint initiative of Brigham Young University, the College of William and Mary, and Development Gateway, is working with the World Bank to roll out 80+ new country maps and corresponding data during the Spring Meetings.

Mapping results in Bangladesh shows how swiftly Bank support has been distributed to reach people in need, and in locations where impact is greatest.

In late 2007, for example, food and fuel prices began increasing globally as the country recovered from a monsoon that affected almost half the population and internally displaced 11 million people. Then disaster struck a second time. A massive cyclone hit another half of the country’s districts and affected 8.7 million citizens.

This map shows the locations of the $383 million in Bank disaster response projects from 2008-2011 against a base map of the most disaster-prone areas in the country. Project locations are spread throughout damaged areas in the Western part of the country, with special concentration in the hard-hit Ganges Delta.

Rapid disbursements helped alleviate suffering and supported rebuilding shelters and coastal embankments. Notably, projects to secure clean water and prevent further flooding were launched in the population center and capital of Dhaka.

Food Crisis Response

The related food issue was not forgotten. Many disaster recovery projects contained components to regain lost production from agriculture and fisheries.

Despite recovery attempts, the magnitude of devastated harvests and livelihoods created another disaster: food prices in markets soared. Many Bangladeshis were forced to cut meals from their daily diets, eat lower quality food, and wait for hours in government queues for relief.

Again, the Bank responded with nationwide projects designed to improve food security through expanding access to agricultural technology, strengthening water supply, restoring livelihoods in disaster-affected areas, reducing environmental degradation, and improving municipal services throughout the country.

Achieving food security amid a global price crisis and challenging national conditions demanded investment beyond the hundreds of millions already devoted through disaster response.

The Bank committed an additional $593 million from 2008-2010. Projects were spread evenly across the country; larger disbursements focused on areas where population was densest.

Here, projects are mapped against a backdrop of recorded malnutrition levels by CIESIN:

The circles, dots and shaded overlays as seen on these maps represent a strategy in action at the confluence of food and climate change, an area critical to keeping the MDGs in sight.

Long-term projects to strengthen food systems and defend against the effects of climate change in Bangladesh are available in the Bank’s mapping portfolio by sector, at maps.worldbank.org/sa/bangladesh.

More solutions to the global food crisis will be discussed at the Open Forum, an April 14-15 global online discussion on the food crisis. Submit your own idea inspired by maps or your own experiences.

Politics of Aid Allocation Redux

2011-04-12T21:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was working on a paper with Chris Marcoux and my student, Claire Peters. The paper is about institutional reform and aid allocation at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and will be presented at the First Annual Conference of the European Political Science Association. During this conversation I learned something about the price of getting a seat on the Executive Board of an IFI or, in the case of the GEF, the "Governing Council."

Loyal readers of the First Tranche will recall that last week I was singing the praises of James Vreeland and his new paper, "Foreign Aid and Global Governance." He shows that the Swiss government gives more bilateral foreign aid to those developing and transition countries that vote to give Switzerland a seat on the IMF and World Bank Executive Boards. Vreeland even estimates a price for the two seats (around $71 million in 2008).

In any description of an economic exchange you need to know the amount of money paid and also what the consumer receives in return for the payment. Vreeland's paper, and my blog post, gave the impression that it was about $71 million per year for two seats on IO boards. But, it turns out the Swiss almost certainly got more for their money than we thought. In fact, they might have gotten many more unobserved things, but one thing I know they got was a seat on the GEF Governing Council.

It turns out that the multi-country constituency that elects the Swiss representative to the Council is almost identical to the group of countries represented by the Swiss at the World Bank and the IMF -- Azerbaijan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and (the only "new" member of the constituency) Kazakhstan. (In the conclusion of his paper Vreeland actually explains the addition of Kazakhstan to the traditional constituency as an effort to compensate for the coming reduction is Swiss voting shares at the Fund and the Bank.) Turns out that group of countries acts in concert within more than just the "big two" Bretton Woods organizations. So, now we know the Swiss get at least three seats for their aid allocations to this bloc of countries. Of course, none of this undermines the logic of the "trade" that is at the heart of Vreeland's paper, but it does encourage me to think harder about what is being traded.

The other fact that lends support to the general logic of Vreeland's argument -- that Switzerland is trading aid money for seats on IO governing boards -- is the fact that at the GEF there are 14 seats reserved for developed countries, 16 seats for developing countries, and 2 seats for "countries in transition." However, while almost all of the other transition countries are represented by individuals from countries in transition, the transition countries that are members of the Swiss bloc (the "Stans" and Azerbaijan) are represented by Switzerland! This is a trans-organizational trading coalition and, who knows, it might extend beyond these three organizations.

Finally, while some representatives who vote on the GEF Governing Council have day jobs as Executive Directors at the World Bank or the IMF (for example, India's ED at the World Bank also represents a South Asian constituency at the GEF), the Swiss have appointed two individuals to serve as EDs at the Bank/Fund and have appointed different individuals to the GEF Council -- the folks serving on the GEF Council actually have an environmental portfolio within the Swiss government. This observation is consistent with Vreeland's broader argument about how seriously the Swiss take their role as global governors in the area of global finance. It appears the same may be true about global environmental issues.

While this is all very exciting to a student of IOs and foreign aid, the greatest thing about this paper we are writing is NOT that it is teaching me about the politics of representation and accountability within multilateral development agencies. No. The greatest...thing...ever: The paper will be presented at a conference held in Dublin, Ireland! And the venue....the Guinness brewery. I am not making this up. I will attend a three day academic conference in a brewery. There is a God and he does love me.

Thoughts on Ten Steps (or at least a few of them)

2011-04-07T21:53:00.003-04:00

Hats off to Owen Barder for his tour de force of a blog post on what needs to happen in aid transparency! At AidData we cheer his arguments that data should be comparable, open, geocoded, and reusable. This is at the heart of the AidData initiative—ensuring that aid datasets integrated into the database are appropriately formatted and coded so that they can be compared with other datasets; making everything public and easily downloadable; geocoding at the activity level; and enabling raw exports rather than pre-packaged or analyzed data so that information can be (dis)aggregated for all sorts of purposes. Soon, it will be possible to export data in IATI format as well.

While all this raw data is fantastic, especially for researchers and analysts, as Owen points out there are also a lot of people interested in aid who would like their information pre-cooked to some degree: a journalist who wants to know how much donors gave to his or her country; a citizen who wants a snapshot of what donors are doing in his or her community; or an NGO that wants a list of other NGOs active in the same sector. Although AidData at the moment may look like simply a big database, behind the scenes there is a lot of work going on to make it more digestible and visual for the kinds of users who would prefer not to read through pages of codes and standard definitions in order to answer a few burning questions (stay tuned!). Along with geocoding, this will pave the way for new initiatives to crowdsource development information, which the AidData team is looking to pilot in Uganda along with Ushahidi and UNICEF.

Linking IATI-format information with country-level aid management systems will be another exciting step (aidinfo and Development Gateway have tested this concept in Malawi and Burkina Faso, working with the national governments). Some of these systems actually do already link to national budget processes: in DRC and Madagascar, for example, the governments use information in the Aid Management Platform (AMP) to prepare their annual budgets. In Senegal, budget information is imported into the local AMP so that it can be analyzed alongside aid, since as Owen says, most stakeholders don’t care whether resources come from aid or domestic resources—they just want to know what resources are available, period. And although many of these systems are not publicly accessible, they are frequently used to create official aid reports that are made public (some examples here).

Adding IATI data feeds to country systems will help governments track activities that are implemented by donors and NGOs outside government channels. I am skeptical that requiring donors to report aid information according to each country budget classification (as Owen advocates) will be feasible at the donor HQ level, since each country has its own classifications. In the spirit of country ownership, seems to me better left to the partner governments themselves to decide how aid maps to their own codes (assuming that they have sufficiently timely and detailed information, per IATI, to do so). IATI will nevertheless reduce transaction costs and improve transparency at the country level significantly.

AidData to make trillions of dollars in development assistance compatible with IATI standard

2011-04-04T20:53:00.009-04:00

In another month or so, users of the AidData database will be able to run queries on aid activities by donor, sector, and country, as before—but with a new twist. The results will be exportable in the new international aid reporting standard recently finalized by the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

The aid transparency movement has gained rapid momentum in the last year or two, with growing interest from both producers and consumers of aid information. Recent high-profile launches of open data portals and dashboards, such as those of the World Bank and the United States, are evidence of this (Sweden just launched its new Openaid site on Monday).

But mounds of publicly accessible data don’t necessarily mean that the people who need to coordinate activities on the ground, or make decisions about aid allocation, or determine whether aid reached its intended destination, will have the information they need at the right moment. Without a universally-accepted protocol on aid information reporting, aid datasets remain isolated and must be analyzed and repackaged individually.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has taken on this challenge by developing a global aid reporting standard, defining the specific pieces of information that should be reported for each aid project and prescribing a universal XML format for this information. In the words of Claudia Elliot of Publish What You Fund, IATI’s efforts mean that “more information will now be better information.”

In February 2011, IATI finalized its standard, and both DfID and the Hewlett Foundation recently published data in the IATI registry. IATI’s sixteen other donor signatories have agreed to do the same by the time of the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness this coming November.

AidData is now working to enable users to export projects from the AidData database in the XML format prescribed by IATI. The AidData database currently accounts for around $4 trillion in development activities funded by nearly 90 donor agencies between 1945 and 2010 - this feature will therefore instantly make a vast quantity of aid information compatible with the IATI standard. The feature will also make it easier to mash up data on development activities with other types of information (such as development statistics, as in AidData’s prototype web app, Development Loop, created with support from Esri).

Of course, the information in the IATI exports will be incomplete, as it will depend on what information donors have already reported in the datasets that AidData draws from. However, being able to view this information in IATI format will be an important step in allowing donors and aid information users to assess where the gaps are and what is needed to create a more comprehensive picture. It will be interesting to see how users will take advantage of the ability to compare data from dozens of donors with information posted to the IATI Registry and other sources. Stay tuned!

The Politics of Foreign Aid Allocation

2011-04-04T19:16:00.000-04:00

My day job is to teach courses on international relations at the College of William and Mary. I'm currently teaching a course called International Relations in Disciplinary Perspective. The idea is to look at similar issues (war, terrorism, trade, human rights, development, etc...) from multiple disciplinary perspectives. This allows students to make their own (informed) judgments about which discipline helps them answer the questions that most interest them. More importantly, it encourages students, and their professors, to think about how, if at all, insights from different disciplines might be synthesized for a fuller understanding of various empirical questions in IR. I love this class because I get to read the research of my colleagues in Economics, Government, and History. And, while humbling, I also get to see them teach!

This week we are talking about foreign aid allocation, aid effectiveness, and aid transparency. As I prepared my part of the lecture I intended to illustrate the ways in which political scientists study these topics and compare these approaches to those taken by economists. What I found in this issue area was convergence (and co-authorship) among economists and political scientists. Some of the best contributions by political scientists focus upon the domestic political factors within donor countries (Examples here here and here) or recipient countries (here, and here). But I found as many or more of these papers written by economists and they often used similar research strategies.

However, a surprising number of political scientists (and a growing number of economists) analyze aid allocation from a geo-strategic perspective where states make aid commitments or allocations in pursuit of other foreign policy goals, rather than just domestic political goals.

David Baldwin and Hans Morgenthau provide the classic treatments of this subject in political science, but recently I have seen a surge of new interest in this approach. Many economists and political scientists argue that bilateral aid flows from the United States are related to a recipient's position and/or voting record on the UN Security Council. But while the U.S. is notorious for such practices, middle powers and even small countries may use aid for strategic purposes...and we should keep this in mind as we attempt to explain their allocation behavior.

Last week my colleague Maurits Van Der Veen suggested that resource poor countries make promises to rich countries that are experiencing natural disasters in the hopes of increasing their aid receipts from those same rich countries in the future. This strikes me as both interesting and testable.

More convincingly, Jim Vreeland just published a paper in the Review of International Organizations showing that even countries not normally considered geo-strategic donors (Switzerland!!) do allocate their bilateral aid in an attempt to secure positions on the Executive Boards of the IMF and the World Bank. Vreeland argues that while some coalitions of countries that elect representatives to Bank and IMF Executive Boards make sense from a geographic, cultural, or historical point of view, Switzerland has assembled an odd coalition (by franc) that includes Uzbekistan, Serbia, Poland, Azerbaijan, and a collection of other countries that have little in common... except that they receive a disproportionate amount of aid from Switzerland. See figure 1 below.

Vreeland puts the cost of a seat on the Executive Board in context by asking: "What is the price of the Swiss Executive Directorships at the World Bank and the IMF?" After much data analysis we learn:

"This produces an estimate of around US $71.4 million annual aid due to their membership in the Swiss-bloc, which amounts to less than 0.015% of Switzerland’s nominal GDP (which was about 492 billion in 2008). In per capita terms, Directorships at the World Bank and the IMF cost Switzerland’s 7.6 million people about US$9.40 each in 2008. To put this in perspective, this is less than half of the hourly wage of a supermarket cashier in Zurich."

I have no idea if that is worth it for Swiss taxpayers, but I love the fact that we now know the price.

My favorite recent example of foreign aid geopolitics comes from a paper written not by a political scientist, but by economist Christian Dippel. He shows that Japan uses foreign aid to reward developing countries that join the International Whaling Commission and vote (with Japan) to loosen restrictions on whaling. As compelling, he shows the the United Kingdom will threaten to cut aid (and will actually cut allocations) to developing countries who side with Japan against the UK.

It has become common place (even among economists) to control for domestic political variables within donor and recipient countries when explaining aid allocation and aid effectiveness. These recent studies suggest we should not forget what Morgenthau explained almost 50 years ago...

"A policy of foreign aid is no different from diplomatic or military policy or propaganda. They are all weapons in the political armory of the nation. As military policy is too important a matter to be left ultimately to the generals, so is foreign aid too important a matter to be left in the end to the economists."

Increasingly, researchers seem to have taken that message to heart...even the economists.

Aid and reconstruction challenges in post-disaster contexts: Japan and Haiti

2011-03-31T18:42:00.001-04:00

Over the past few weeks, much media attention has been focused on Japan, as it deals with the aftermath of a massive earthquake/tsunami. The affected areas are clearly in need of both emergency relief and long-term rebuilding. Of course, Japan is far too rich a country to receive aid in the form of official development assistance. Indeed, a lack of money is rather unlikely to constitute a constraint on Japan's response to the disaster: given Japan's near-zero rate of inflation, the government can print just about all the money it will need.

Instead, the primary constraint, as is often the case with natural disasters, appears to be one of infrastructure, logistics, and coordination: there are only so many vehicles available to drive around the area, only so many officials sufficiently familiar with the area, so many places where relief workers can be housed, etc., and all the activities of domestic and foreign organizations need to be coordinated. For this reason, Japan has been very selective in the aid it has asked for from other nations: it has asked for search-and-rescue help from four or five countries and it just recently requested assistance from a French nuclear reactor manufacturer.

Because financial resources are unlikely to be a constraint in Japan's case, people who are moved by the devastation and wish to help would probably do better to look back at last year's earthquake in Haiti and donate to organizations that continue to do crucial work there, after the world media has largely moved on. Whereas Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, Haiti is one of the poorest, and here money definitely is a constraint. Two organizations that do excellent work in Haiti are Partners in Health (PIH) and Doctors without Borders (MSF).

Haiti is also an interesting case study of the challenges involved in trying to make aid work. One year after the quake, hundreds of thousands of people still live in temporary, make-shift camps, and 95% of the rubble remains uncleared, despite massive pledges of aid. Moreover, the slow reconstruction process has made possible a cholera outbreak which so far has taken the lives of almost 5000 people.

(picture from the website of the U.S. mission in Geneva)

A recent report by Oxfam International highlights some of the problems Haiti faces:

- Aid agencies, trying to give aid as directly and effectively as possible, bypass local and national authorities. This undermines the government, frustrates attempts at improving governance in Haiti, and, of course, makes the coordination of aid efforts nearly impossible.

- Aid agencies, including the central Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, rarely consult with the targets of aid initiatives (local civil society)

- Aid agencies are more interested in building new things, to which they can attach their name, than they are in cleaning up, general maintenance, etc. Thus there are plenty of funds earmarked for new buildings, but almost none for the rubble-clearing that needs to come first

- Not all aid donors live up to their promised commitments. The Oxfam report notes that as of November 2010, only about 40% of the funds pledged to Haiti for 2010 had been disbursed, according to the UN Special Envoy to Haiti. As of today (March 30), the envoy's website shows that about $4.5 billion has been promised, of which 31.1% remains pending, and 38.3% has been committed but not actually disbursed (i.e. made available):

All of these problems are depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied foreign aid in other contexts. Still, moved by the particular urgency of such a massive humanitarian crisis, donors might have been expected to overcome their traditional reluctance to coordinate, listen to their recipient counterparts, and live up to their promises. Unfortunately, long-standing practices are difficult to change, no matter how urgent the impetus.

On an encouraging note, Haiti’s Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation (MPCE) is now implementing an Aid Management Platform (AMP) (funded by aid donors) to facilitate transparent and effective aid management and tracking. AMP will help the government to monitor the performance and alignment of aid and external private and public investments in the context of the official Action Plan for the Recovery and Development of Haiti (PARDH).

It is to be hoped that this will speed up the conversion of pending and committed aid into actual disbursements to help the rebuilding of Haiti. Still even if all promised aid is disbursed, the need in Haiti will remain great, and (as mentioned above) organizations such as PIH and MSF could definitely use additional private contributions.

From recipients to donors: Developing countries as providers of disaster relief

2011-03-30T17:16:00.000-04:00

Countries that suffer from major natural disasters always receive offers of aid from around the world. As one would expect, neighboring and allied states are particularly likely to offer aid, and the major contributors tend to be those countries that are also large donors of official development assistance (ODA). But the list also includes countries that one does not normally think of as aid donors.

A Wikipedia page which has been tracking international aid offers to Japan shows that Afghanistan (or rather, the city of Kandahar) has donated $50,000, Albania has offered $100,000, as have Cambodia, Laos and North Korea, which are hardly political allies of Japan (nor, one might think, can they really afford to just give money away like that).

So why might such countries offer disaster relief? It is unlikely that these contributions will make a tangible difference in the relief effort, as money is not the limiting factor in Japan's response. Many of the offers are clearly symbolic, and some donors almost certainly do not expect their offers to be accepted (North Korea, for instance). But there may also be some self-interest involved. It seems plausible that some countries are offering in help in part as a way to express gratitude for receiving Japanese foreign aid in the past and/or in hopes of receiving such aid in the future.

For example, a search of the AidData database (see at the bottom of this posting) shows that Japan has funded about 50 aid projects in East Timor (Timor-Leste) in recent years. Now that country has promised to send 100 people to clear rubble, according to Wikipedia's tally. It seems unlikely that Japan will accept the offer (it would have to house, host, and manage the efforts of 100 people who likely speak no Japanese and have never been to Japan before, at a time when there are almost certainly plenty of local Japanese eager to do the same work). But it will be interesting to see if Japan's aid to Timor-Leste changes at all in coming years.

In fact, there is an earlier natural disaster for which we can look into this a bit more. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, about 100 countries and international organizations offered aid to the United States. As with Japan today, Afghanistan and Albania made offers, but they were more generous to the United States, with Afghanistan donating $100,000 and Albania $308,000. Since the scale of devastation and the death toll are far greater in Japan, it is clear that these donations do not reflect the severity of the disaster.

Certainly the United States is much more involved in Afghanistan than Japan is, so Afghanistan's greater largesse is not surprising. But Albania's case is less clear. In fact, according to AidData, US aid to Albania in 2004 (the year before Katrina) was less than half Japan's aid to Albania in 2008, the most recent year for which we have complete data (search results at the bottom of this post). Not only that: U.S. ODA to Albania had declined considerably from 2003 to 2004. It is possible that Albania thought an aid offer might stem any further decline; if so, it seems to have worked, at least temporarily: 2005 (the year of Katrina) and 2006 aid from the US to Albania remained relatively constant. But in 2007 it fell once more, by quite a bit.

These are just two cases out of dozens of ODA recipients that offered assistance to the United States in 2005 or Japan today. As far as I know, nobody has systematically investigated either the determinants of aid offers by ODA recipients, or the impact of such offers on future aid flows, but it seems like an issue well worth investigating further.

• AidData search results: Japanese aid to Timor-Leste in 2007 and 2008

• AidData search results: U.S. aid to Albania, 2003-2007

• AidData search results: Japanese aid to Albania, 2007-2008

AidData in smaller doses

2011-03-23T16:05:00.006-04:00

AidData's online data interface allows users to construct precise search specifications to hone in on a particular set of aid projects they are interested in. However, for those whose interests are broader, and might like to conduct a larger number of different searches, the online interface inevitably becomes somewhat cumbersome.

One alternative is to use AidData's research releases. The most current release is 1.9.2.
Unfortunately, this is a very large file, containing information about almost 1 million projects. That
makes it cumbersome, and perhaps impossible, to handle for computers with less than, say, 8GB
of memory (RAM).

Since most computers probably fall into that category, we have now made available a few subsets of
the data that will be more manageable for most computers, and may allow people to perform the
data analysis they wish to do. At the moment, the following subsets are available:

1. United States aid projects only (about 110,000 projects)
2. Aid projects from the European Union and its member states (480,000)
3. Aid projects from non-DAC (i.e. non-OECD) donors (140,000)
4. All aid projects since the year 2000 (670,000)

The files are in comma-separated value (csv) format, and compressed (zipped). They can easily
be converted for use in standard statistics packages using a utility such as Stat/Transfer.

If you have any questions regarding these releases, contact info@aiddata.org!

AidData celebrates first birthday

2011-03-23T15:23:00.005-04:00

This week AidData turns one. It’s been an exciting year for the aid transparency movement overall, with the finalization of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data standard, increasing transparency at the country level, lots of new ideas on making development information more accessible, and new research and analysis on transparency and aid quality.

Meanwhile, since the launch of AidData.org last year, the program has made some exciting progress in making information on development assistance more transparent and useful—highlights included working with the World Bank Institute on the Mapping for Results initiative, and creating the Development Loop application as a pilot platform for opening up a dialogue around development projects, with support from Esri. Thanks to all our friends and partners in the fields of aid transparency and information technology for your collaboration, and to the generous donors who make this work possible. Looking forward to a great second year!

Aid to be paid on delivery?

2011-03-18T09:25:00.006-04:00

For the past few months, the New York Times has featured an excellent series of online articles by Tina Rosenberg looking at solutions to social problems, many of them development-related. Each time she writes a first post presenting an idea, and then a follow-up post a few days later responding to comments.

In January, she wrote about conditional cash transfers to the poor (here and here); a few weeks later she discussed microcredit and microconsignment (here and here); in mid-February she discussed the possibility of drastically improving healthcare in developing countries without needing to train (and retain!) new doctors (here and here). All of these are well worth reading.

Her most recent entries in the series appeared on March 14th and 18th, and address the idea of changing the protocol for foreign aid to a cash-on-delivery model. The articles discuss the promise and some of the potential pitfalls of using aid to pay for past, rather than future, performance. Much of the first article draws on a fine book by Nancy Birdsall and William Savedoff, Cash on Delivery: A New Approach to Foreign Aid, which was just published in a revised edition by the Center for Global Development.

The idea behind cash on delivery is that aid recipients are paid for achieving various development benchmarks (for example, $20 for every child that finishes elementary school), plus bonuses for additional achievements. The book highlights several important features of the COD scheme: it is likely to be more transparent than traditional aid, it requires less heavy handed oversight on the part of donors (who traditionally want a say in how various goals are achieved), and it can make more efficient use of the available aid funds.

Rosenberg highlights another potential contribution: it may increase public support in donor nations for foreign aid. After all, donor state citizens would know precisely what they got for their money, so to speak. Rosenberg suggests that this might contribute to eliminating the persistent misperception among most Americans that the United States gives large amounts of aid and that most of it is wasted.

COD is an intriguing notion, and it will be exciting to see it put into practice (apparently the British government will begin a pilot project soon). However, as Rosenberg hints in her posts, this may be unexpectedly complicated. Birdsall and Savedoff claim in the preface to their book that "the only true preconditions for this new approach are a good measure of progress and a credible way to verify it," suggesting that this is fairly straightforward. But of course it isn't.

Rosenberg cites a similar project by the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which learned that they had underestimated the required management skills to implement a COD vaccination scheme and that, moreover, there was a big temptation to exaggerate accomplishments (since remuneration was linked to those accomplishments). There is no reason to think these problems will be any less for more traditional development assistance projects.

At the moment, COD in development assistance is little more than an intriguing notion. It may turn out that it simply will not work in practice. On the other hand, it may turn out that it will work much better than traditional development assistance, as some of its advocates suggest. I suspect, however, that it will work reasonably well under certain conditions and for certain projects, but most of the time will not measurably outperform traditional aid.

For COD to be preferable to traditional forms of aid, reliably measuring progress must be cheaper and/or less invasive than is the case with oversight mechanisms for the latter. There is no reason to believe that this will hold true in practice; at least not as a general rule.

Advocates of COD also emphasize benefits in terms of accountability and transparency, for recipient and donor populations alike. For such benefits to become reality, information about these projects has to be both widely disseminated and easy to understand. Here, too, it is not obvious that this will be easier to achieve for COD than it is for traditional aid.

Traditional aid programs have not been all that transparent or accountable, but that is not inherent in the method. Over the past few years, AidData and others have been changing this, making extensive project information available to anyone who is interested, in donor countries as well as recipient countries. Of course, data availability is not the same as awareness and understanding, and it is possible that COD projects are somehow inherently easier to understand. Rosenberg's account suggests that she believes they are.

Initial tests of COD will probably simply see whether the approach can work at all. A real test, however, ought to compare two projects with the same goals, one set up along traditional
lines, and one along COD lines, each of which invested the same quantity of resources both in the project itself and in disseminating information about it. Only then could we ask:
1. Does the COD project achieve better (or at least the same) outcomes with the same resources?
2. Are donors and recipients better able to understand the COD project than the traditional one?
3. Are donors and recipients more likely to seek information about COD projects than traditional ones?

In fact, it might be possible to investigate the second and third questions before even testing COD in practice. Take a few projects from the AidData database for which post-project evaluations have been done, so we know performance outcomes. Translate the project description into a COD format: for example, instead of saying the project funded the construction of a school, say that it paid the recipient 20$ for each student attending the school for a year. Then conduct a survey (ideally in both donor and recipient countries), and gauge how people interpret and react to these competing descriptions of the same project:
Does one seem easier to understand than the other?
Does the traditional format sound more or less efficient / wasteful?
Do donors and recipients react in the same way to these descriptions?

Rosenberg argues that one benefit of COD aid might be eliminating persistent misperceptions among American citizens about how much aid the United States gives, and how much good it does. A survey along the lines just described might go some way towards telling us whether Rosenberg is correct on this point. Even if she is wrong, COD might still be preferable from the point of view of development outcomes, but it will be valuable to know what its other implications are before investing large sums of money.

Putting Aside the "Humanitarian, Do-Good" Stuff

2011-03-11T15:57:00.000-05:00

By Chris Marcoux, Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow at the College of William and Mary

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke “straight realpolitik” at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week, urging the committee to “put aside the humanitarian, do-good side of what we believe in” and recognize that the United States is “in competition with China.” Clinton argued that proposed budget cuts to U.S. foreign assistance would hinder the ability of the United States to compete for global influence. Reducing aid expenditures would render the U.S. less able to promote its national interests in international relations. By way of example, Clinton noted that the U.S.-based corporation Exxon-Mobil was being forced to fend off challenges from Chinese competitors following its recent energy find in Papua New Guinea. These comments were notable not because they represent a change in course for the Secretary of State. To the contrary, they continue the recent trend of couching foreign assistance in terms of national defense (in February, Clinton suggested that aid cuts would be devastating to U.S. national security).

What are we to make of this trend?

Last year, a group of AidData researchers presented a working paper at the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting entitled "Foreign Aid in Hard Times" in which we developed some preliminary conjectures about the political-economic influences on aid effort – the size of a country’s foreign aid commitments relative to its overall economic size. One of our more interesting, if preliminary, findings was that economic hard times did not have a uniform effect on aid volume. Though we observed an overall relationship between unemployment and aid commitments, this effect was strongly mediated by domestic politics. In our cross national sample of donors, we observed that aid commitments in politically “Left” governments were much more susceptible to economic decline than were aid commitments in more conservative, “Right” governments.

We speculate that left leaning legislators see foreign aid as designed to promote development and help poor people in developing countries. However, left-leaning legislators rely on support from labor interests and in economic hard times they find it harder to justify sending aid abroad when their core constituents are struggling. However, right leaning legislators see foreign aid as a tool to promote commercial interests within their core business constituencies or as a tool to promote foreign policy goals of their country. Hence, right-leaning legislators are less sensitive to unemployment when deciding on how much foreign aid to give. While it may be true that left-leaning politicians look more favorably on foreign aid in general than their conservative counterparts, they find themselves in more of a political bind during economic hard times.

This got me to thinking about my William and Mary colleague, Maurits Van Der Veen. In a forthcoming book entitled Framing Aid, Van Der Veen argues that the way in which foreign aid is framed in political debates has important consequences for both aid volume and allocation. Is it possible that the increased vulnerability of aid budgets under left governments (compared to right governments) results, at least in part, from framing choices? Based on her recent comments, it certainly seems as if Hillary Clinton thinks so.

U.S. Aid to Africa Over Time

2011-03-08T12:31:00.003-05:00

Many readers of First Tranche told me they liked the cartogram of U.S. aid flows to the rest of the world from 1985-2008. My student, Ashley Ingram, followed up that work with a similar map of Africa for the same time period. I actually like this one better as it allows you to see allocation patterns more clearly.

Observations:

1. For all of the time series Egypt dominates the map. For much of the time series Egypt and South Africa are among the richest countries in Africa and are getting very large sums of aid from the U.S. government.

2. If you want to see what a "donor darling" looks like, watch the size of Uganda change over time.

3. Countries with the "no value" in terms of reported statistics on GNI per capita are usually closed regimes (Libya in the 80s and 90s) or they are failed states (Somalia and the DRC). Speaking of the DRC, notice how large it gets in the 90s. Lots of money for refugees and internally displaced people.

4. Libya does receive U.S. aid from 2004-2008 (mostly money to dismantle nuclear and other WMD programs, to provide employment for Libyan nuclear scientists, to fund NGOs that publicize corruption with Libya, and to support free press projects as displayed below) but the amounts are quite small. I'm guessing Qaddafi is wishing he had a viable nuclear program right now and that he is not all that thrilled about Libyan NGOs and transparency advocates getting support from the U.S. government to publicize corruption within Qaddafi's regime over the past five years. Given this content, it makes any calls for the U.S. to "cut off aid to Libya" pretty nonsensical. The aid currently being provided by the U.S. to Libya is not the kind of aid most struggling dictators want.

All U.S. aid to Libya search is here...

Transparency Promotes Data Visualization

2011-02-22T13:13:00.021-05:00

Over the past few months I have been looking at lots of development finance data as visualized by new and very cool mapping, charting, and data mash up tools. The combination of easily accessible data on development finance and open data from the World Bank's World Development Indicators allows computer software geniuses (and my own students who have taken a few GIS courses) to visualize data in useful and interesting ways. For example, for the past few weeks I have been following the World Bank's "Apps for Development" competition. My favorite is a web and mobile application called Development Loop that was built by my (smarter and more creative) colleagues at AidData. But I also really like Economic Data Finder that integrates your web browsing of news stories with access to charts and graphs of the concepts/indicators mentioned in the stories. This App will be especially useful for professors who want to be timely, but are still putting together their lectures and slide presentations 45 minutes before class starts.

My favorite data visualization for this week is a work in progress brought to you by Ashley Ingram, a William and Mary student who is double majoring in Economics and Sociology. Ashley and I had been talking about whether U.S. foreign aid allocations shifted after the Cold War to target poorer countries rather than being driven so strongly by geo-political concerns. Naturally, I started talking about academic papers that showed this, that, or the other using cross national time series analysis. Ashley did something much cooler. She used AidData to map all the foreign aid given by the U.S. government for each year since 1985 into a series of cartograms where the dollar value of aid substitutes for the actual geographic area of land. Then she embedded these maps so you can see change in aid flows over time. If that wasn't cool enough, she also added data on average income by country so that light colored countries are poorest and dark colored countries are relatively rich. If U.S. aid flows shift dramatically to poorer countries after the Cold War, our maps should be getting lighter after 1990. And, they are...sort of...

A larger and higher-resolution version of this file is available for download.

Here are the 8 things that jump out at me when I look at this map. My colleagues who looked at this saw very different things and I'd be really interested to hear what other people think they see, and what it means.

1. The continent of Africa, which contains many of the world's poorest countries, does get larger over time, especially late in the time series.

2. Some of the increased aid to Africa is flowing to the richest countries in Africa (like South Africa right after the end of Apartheid in the early 90s and a second surge of dollars for HIV/AIDS programs from 2006-08).

3. The map does get lighter over time, but there are noticible blips of increasing darkness, like the large infusions of aid to relatively rich countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.

4. Some really obvious things are constant and do not change -- Egypt and Israel remain massive splotches on the map every year as a result of the Camp David settlement.

5. Post invasion Iraq and Afghanistan receive massive and sudden increases in aid that literally distort the map. I guess Paul Wolfowitz was wrong about those Iraqi oil revenues paying for reconstruction.

6. Aid to Pakistan is very volatile. Lots of aid until 1990. Very little until 2001. Lots of aid after 2001. This pattern appears to be driven by two things: pursuit of nuclear weapons, which the U.S. deems unacceptable in 1990; and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the war on terror, which apparently makes nuclear weapons in Pakistan no longer unacceptable.

7. U.S. aid to Latin America declines in most countries, especially the middle income countries, but Peru and Colombia defy gravity.

8. Relative to other regions, East Asia seems remarkably stable and gets very little aid over time. The most interesting changes occur when the U.S. attempts to buy North Korean compliance with various nuclear deals (see the polka-dotted country appear suddenly in 1999 and 2002).

Very rarely do such data visualizations answer important questions definitively, and this one doesn't either. But I have found repeatedly that seeing data in a different way does raise good questions and causes people to think creatively. The exact same data in a flat table, a line graph, a regression table, and a cartogram look very different and suggest different things. I did not expect some of the things listed above. Some of them raise interesting questions and/or suggest hypotheses to be explored. Some of them are downright misleading. A few observations to get our conversation started...

A. While Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Peru contribute to the "lightening" of the map, presumably the aid is not being targeted for these countries simply because they are in the bottom two quartiles in terms of poverty. Correlation (even in multi-colored maps) does not equal causation.

B. Poverty is not uniformly distributed within countries, so even if "less poor" countries are receiving a lot of aid, it does not mean the aid is not going to poor people (though it probably is not). In order to test this hypothesis (or visualize it) we would need sub-national data like this.

C. What the heck is that "rich" dark blue blob on the map under Jordan? I know that Yemen gets a lot of foreign aid, but I keep hearing on CNN that Yemen is very poor. It is not Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Oman (I checked and the U.S. gives little or no aid to those countries for most years).

Bottom line: The thing that you REALLY need to make useful visualizations is better data. Right now the gee-whiz tech tools are better than the underlying data (at least the data that is publicly available). This is especially true at the sub-national level.

I apologize if I sound like a broken record, but I am really pleased about the adoption of the IATI standard and I am looking forward to the day when donor governments, recipient governments, and aid implementing organizations make more of their data publicly accessible.

This post was originally published on Full Disclosure, which is the DevEx aid transparency blog. For a link to the original post click here.

Gendering Agricultural Aid?

2011-02-07T11:43:00.000-05:00

A recent paper published in Gender and Society by Liz Ransom and Carmen Bain shows that efforts to "mainstream gender" into agricultural aid projects have been mixed, at best, and that in recent years the percentage of projects and dollars targeting women has actually declined.

Ransom and Bain used AidData to identify the universe of agricultural projects allocated to developing countries between 1978 and 2003. Then they independently coded a sample of these projects in order to identify the type of agricultural aid and whether the projects directly or indirectly targeted women. The Figure below shows the percentage of agricultural projects that fell into one of six broad categories in a given year (white bar) and the percentage of projects within that sub-sector that targeted women/gender (shaded bar). Across all six types of agriculture aid the pattern looks similar -- no targeting at the beginning of the time series, a surge in the 1990s, and then drop off in 2002-2003. The figure below shows one of the six categories (Ag Infrastructure).

It turns out that while the discourse about mainstreaming gender and targeting vulnerable female populations has continued to increase over time, dollars for this purpose have not. Ransom and Bain conclude on a pessimistic note: "Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of gender mainstreaming outstrips efforts to develop projects aimed at women and gender inequality and that the concept may be being used to legitimize a decline in focusing explicitly on women." For the whole paper click here.

Their findings are similar to Powers et al who compare actual budgets of World Bank projects to the rhetoric of environmental mainstreaming within the Bank and show that rhetoric often outstrips funding reality in that sector as well.

Moving closer to an international data standard for aid information

2011-02-01T17:15:00.003-05:00

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), launched in 2008 during the Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, is approaching a major milestone. Next Wednesday, its Steering Committee will meet to finalize the second phase of the IATI data standard (the first phase was agreed last summer). Meanwhile, just this week, the UK’s aid agency—the Department for International Development (DFID)—became the first donor to publish its data on the IATI data registry in the agreed format. Many more donors will publish their information in this format in the lead up to the Busan High Level Forum to be held in Nov./Dec. 2011.

IATI has been signed by 18 donors and endorsed by 18 partner countries, including Liberia and Bangladesh most recently. In advance of next week’s meeting, 35 CSOs advocating greater transparency and comparability of aid information have sent letters to IATI signatories encouraging them to make sure IATI delivers. In particular, they emphasize the need to address the priority concerns of countries receiving aid, including the timely provision of data on current and projected aid flows, and the use of common data formats that are compatible with national budgets and systems.

As donors, partner countries, and other development organizations make progress toward speaking the same language—using the same definitions and classifications for different types of aid flows—it makes AidData’s job much easier. Soon, AidData users will be able to download data in IATI format, so stay tuned. Being able to aggregate, disaggregate, and mash up aid information from many sources is key to answering the most basic and the most sophisticated questions about where aid goes and what impact is has.

AidData Enters Aid Mapping Prototype into Apps for Development Competition

2011-01-19T14:00:00.004-05:00

AidData, supported by Esri, has submitted its mapping prototype – Development Loop – in the World Bank’s Apps for Development Competition. The app allows users to visualize the geocoded locations of foreign aid projects. The GIS application displays World Bank and African Development Bank projects geocoded as part of the AidData/World Bank Institute “Mapping for Results” initiative. In addition to foreign aid projects, the app contains GlobalGiving “Success Stories” – field reports on the effectiveness of individual aid projects – and sub-national socioeconomic indicators including poverty rates, population density, infant mortality, and child malnutrition.

This video provides a brief demonstration of some of the key features of the app:

To vote for AidData’s Development Loop Application in the contest, go to the World Bank Apps for Development site. Public Voting begins January 31.

Better Data Could Inform This Debate

2010-11-18T14:20:00.001-05:00

My colleague at William and Mary, Maurits Van Der Veen, recently blogged about a post by William Easterly and Laura Freschi published in the New York Review of Books. According to Easterly and Freschi, western donors are propping up dictators by providing aid in a manner that allows recipient governments to reward political supporters and punish the opposition.

Van Der Veen mostly agrees with their conclusions, but uses AidData to sort projects by size and then concludes, "Searching the database for aid projects in Ethiopia in the past few years, and then sorting by declining project size shows — not surprisingly — that all of the largest projects take place in conjunction with the official authorities." Those projects are displayed below and can be sorted by donor, year, dollar amount, etc...

For the entire Van Der Veen Post, click here.

Easterly and Freschi are probably correct when they assert that donors have not bypassed the regime in order to deliver aid to local NGOs or directly to recipients. Van Der Veen moves from assertion to simple empirical poking and shows that for the projects with the largest dollar amounts, donors have worked in conjunction with official authorities. But what all these researchers really want/need is accurate information on the implementing agency or the "channel of delivery" for these projects. That would allow them to determine what proportion of projects and what proportion of dollars are delivered through recipient government agencies. To date, the majority of projects in AidData (and the OECD's CRS database) simply do not have information about whether these projects were implemented by private contractors, western NGOs, local NGOs, local government officials, national government officials, or staff members of the donor agency. Having this information would allow researchers to definitively answer such questions about aid allocation and related questions about aid effectiveness.

Aid Transparency After the Election: Emerging Common Ground?

2010-11-10T11:41:00.000-05:00

This is a guest post by Karin Christiansen, who is the Director of Publish What You Fund.

The shift to Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives means aid transparency is set to emerge as an area of common ground.

As Representative John Boehner (R-OH) said in July this year, "The American people [...] deserve to be a part of an open and transparent process”. Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) highlighted just last month that “much of the raw data about government spending and performance is not accessible” and has stated “The ultimate goal is full transparency and accountability” in a conversation referring to unanswered Freedom of Information requests.

Members of both parties have shown their commitment to greater transparency and an open government to ensure accountability and value for money to taxpayers. Recently launched websites such as data.gov, recovery.gov, and usaspending.gov now allow citizens to see how their tax dollars are spent and where their money is going.

The day after the midterm elections President Obama said “I think the American people want to see more transparency, more openness. [...] And I think if you take Republicans and Democrats at their word this is an area that they want to deliver on for the American people”.

A major focus on aid transparency is emerging within U.S. foreign assistance, with the launch of the U.S. “aid transparency initiative” and an “aid dashboard” as part of the new framework on aid effectiveness. These steps demonstrate the political will for accountability and aid transparency, yet real value for money is still not being delivered. What is needed to ensure that aid money is used to best effect is comparability. For more effective foreign assistance, U.S. efforts should complement those of other donors.

Currently, the U.S. gives over $20 billion in foreign assistance each year through nearly two dozen different agencies and mechanisms. With the proliferation of agencies and increased funding levels, there has not been a sufficient effort to track where teh money is going and the impact it is having.

Fundamental to getting the most out of information on foreign assistance is a common language operating between U.S. agencies and with other donors. Without a common language – the ability to map and match data – we cannot get the most out of information. Comparability is what turns more information into better information.

Only when aid information can be compared across U.S. agencies and with other donors will it be possible for legislators, taxpayers, and aid workers to tell if money is being put to the best use possible. Without knowing what other donors and development agencies are planning, how do you know where to channel your own resources? Similarly, without knowing what resources the national government and other donors are, say, putting into the Liberian health sector, how can you tell whether U.S. efforts are having an impact?

There is already a coalition of major donors developing a common language to address the need for comparability; the process is called the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). The U.S. needs to seize the opportunity to ensure the IATI standard works for American and ensure taxpayers' money is spent to best effect not just at home, but also abroad.

Mapping development for better results

2010-10-29T16:50:00.003-04:00

The author of this blog entry, Ilona Mäkinen, is working with Development Gateway while doing research for her Master’s thesis at the Aalto University School of Science. She focuses on ways to make development assistance by NGOs and foundations more effective through the novel use of technology.

I always admire projects that challenge conventional ways of thinking by proposing something completely new.

“We were told this is impossible. But we thought let’s just try it,” explained Soren Gigler, a Sr. Governance Specialist at the World Bank Institute, about the Mapping for Results project to the audience of a couple hundred that gathered at the World Bank yesterday. Mapping for Results, a joint project of the World Bank and AidData, focuses on geocoding the locations of World Bank projects so that they can be rendered in interactive maps and used for other visualizations and analysis. It was one of several showcased initiatives aiming to make aid more effective through new technologies and geographical information.

The presentations in Washington and the panel discussants video-conferenced in from Kenya demonstrated how mapping helps to track resources, aids in planning of projects, assists coordination, and enables increased accountability. Given the fierce debate around aid effectiveness, that’s a set of goals worth striving for.

The common cliché, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” captures what the fuss about mapping is all about. “Placing the World Bank projects on a map promotes understanding of the projects quickly. When there are so many projects in one area, the people on the ground need some way to have a snapshot of the situation,” explains Kelsey Ranta, who was one of the geocoders who read through thousands of World Bank project documents to extract the location information and translate it into a standardized format.

Simple ideas are often the most powerful. Seeing development projects on a map makes it easier for stakeholders to get a broad understanding of the activities in their area. So what makes it so ground-breaking? “If we get all donors on board, and if the data is publicized on a local level allowing interaction with private citizens, geocoding will be revolutionary for the development assistance field,” envisions Mike Findley, principal researcher for AidData. The many benefits include facilitated coordination among donors and thus better-directed aid. But while the coordination and division of labor among donors have been topics for a long time, the two-way connection to the grassroots level and local citizens is something that the latest technologies would enable to an extent we haven’t seen before. These people would not only be able to gather a vast amount of data easily, but we could finally provide them with information about the multitude of initiatives that ostensibly benefit them. Even local leaders are often not aware of all the projects in their communities!

While the idea of pinpointing development projects on a map might seem like an easy task, looking at the tremendous work Kelsey and her colleagues did on coding World Bank project locations makes it clear that a great amount of hard work is still required. However, the potential to mainstream mapping into World Bank project management, and the innovative means of submitting information via mobile phones and harnessing crowdsourcing (e.g. Ushahidi) reassure me that once the foundations for collecting these data are established, the scaling up will bring great benefits not only for those operating at the grassroots level, but also for recipient governments, final beneficiaries, and people like me, concerned citizens from industrialized countries who would like to understand how our tax money is helping the world become a more equitable place.

The World Bank “Mapping for Results” seminar took place on Oct. 28 in Washington, DC. A video of the full event is available here. The featured initiatives included Mapping for Results, Map Kibera, Ushahidi, Action Atlas, and the Haiti Aid Map.

PWYF Aid Transparency Assessment 2010

2010-10-29T11:49:00.001-04:00

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.

The Elusive Quest for Effective Aid Management in Liberia

2010-10-20T14:16:00.000-04:00

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.

Minister Ngafuan and his colleagues therefore face an extraordinary challenge: they must plan and budget with financial information that covers only 44% or less of their total resource envelope (see Figure 1). Donors who provide off-budget aid can in theory take steps to make their funding more transparent, but in practice this rarely happens. Donor incentives are generally aligned in a way that privileges reporting to Washington D.C. and Brussels, not Monrovia. The U.S. Government, which is by far Liberia's largest donor (providing nearly $230 million a year), provides a useful example. Currently, 100% of U.S. assistance to Liberia is "off budget," and Natty Davis, a senior official in the Office of the Presidency, notes that “the development partner that is most difficult to get [aid] information from is the U.S. government.”

Off-budget aid donors are quick to respond that, as stewards of taxpayer resources, they face a unique set of constraints in countries with weak budgetary, procurement, and financial management institutions; putting aid on budget can substantially increase the risk of waste, fraud, and abuse. But countries like Liberia pose a catch 22: how does a cash-poor government go about strengthening its institutions when donors are preoccupied with designing, implementing, and evaluating their own projects?

One commonly-heard argument is that recipient governments need to first take steps to "put their own house in order" to boost donor confidence. And, by all appearances, the Liberian authorities are doing just that; they have adopted a series of public financial management reforms under the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative, achieved full compliance with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), and strengthened their anti-corruption and supreme audit institutions. Minister Ngafuan has also established an Aid Management Unit in the Ministry of Finance, utilized an Aid Management Platform (AMP) for tracking external resource flows, and rolled out an aggressive new Aid Policy that:

• requires aid-receiving government institutions to report to the Ministries of Finance and Planning within seven days of reaching the agreement with donors;

• forces CSOs to disclose their financial records and agreements made with donors; and

• establishes a common reporting mechanism for recording all development projects undertaken in Liberia

Therefore, the tricky issue for donors is knowing when it is appropriate (and safe) to begin channeling resources through partner government systems. The Danes, the French, the Norwegians, and most UN agencies exclusively provide support to Liberia via off-budget aid. The European Union also remains skittish. However, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, Germany, and DFID have begun to channel modest amounts of assistance through the government (see Figure 2).

In addition to the obvious planning and budget challenges associated with off-budget aid, there are political reasons why aid modality decisions could have a profound influence on development outcomes. Research shows that young democracies, like Liberia, are highly vulnerable to political instability, violence, and unconstitutional transfers of power. Newly-elected governments in post-conflict settings generally have a tenuous grasp on power and must convince voters of their credibility and legitimacy if they have any hope of escaping a major democratic reversal (e.g. a coup). One way for a young democracy to shore up its credibility and legitimacy is to build effective and sustainable public service delivery systems. However, when voters get all of their development "goodies" (e.g. food, water, health, education) from donor-funded projects via off-budget aid, recipient governments risk the appearance of impotence and losing public support. This is precisely why the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, has privately advocated for increased budget support to the Karzai administration and an "Afghanization" of U.S. foreign assistance.

Team Obama has acknowledged the importance of refocusing U.S. foreign assistance programs on long-term capacity building, but only time will tell if the administration can translate its good intentions into tangible changes in the way foreign assistance is delivered. USAID recently announced that it will select 5 pilot countries to test the feasibility of channeling more funds through host country systems in transitional settings. And, as chance would have it, Liberia will be its very first test case. USAID will initially provide small amounts of funding through Liberia's public financial management system, and after assessing whether the country has managed the money well, consider a more substantial increase in on-budget aid. This is an important policy development that deserves careful scrutiny.

Here at AidData, we have begun collecting more comprehensive "channel of delivery" data --in collaboration with Simone Dietrich at Pennsylvania State University and Sarah Bermeo at Duke University -- to enable researchers to evaluate competing claims about the usefulness of on-budget and off-budget aid in different country settings. Our hope is that the emerging set of IATI standards will also facilitate more systematic "channel of delivery" reporting by donor agencies.

World Bank Open Data Initiative Features Geo-Coded Maps

2010-10-08T17:14:00.000-04:00

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.

Making sense of donor acronyms

2010-10-07T18:44:00.000-04:00

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)

Quality of Official Development Assistance Report (QuODA) Issued by Brookings and CGD

2010-10-05T20:54:00.000-04:00

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.

Grassroots Monitoring and Aid Effectiveness: Does Greater Community Involvement Matter?

2010-09-29T13:15:00.000-04:00

The following post was written by Brad Parks, an AidData Principal Investigator, and one of our research assistants, Anca Cretu (William and Mary '11).

There is growing evidence that in many developing countries a substantial percentage of public funding for sectors such as health, education, and infrastructure never reaches the intended beneficiaries. Some reports suggest that less than a quarter of funding is received. One group of researchers from the World Bank found that during the mid-1990s only 22% of public funding for school supplies actually reached Ugandan schools. More recently, the Indian government admitted that only 15% of its funding for employment programs reaches the intended beneficiaries. Estimates of "leakage" -- and methods for calculating it -- vary widely, but there is no question that corruption, mismanagement, and local capture substantially diminish the impact of international aid and other types of public sector financing.

How can the donor community reduce leakage and increase the impact of aid? Transparency and grassroots monitoring are often cited as powerful remedies. The World Bank's 2004 World Development Report proposes “putting poor people at the center of service provision: enabling them to monitor and discipline service providers, amplifying their voice in policymaking, and strengthening the incentives for service providers to serve the poor." This very simple idea -- that local community members have strong incentives to track how funds are being spent in their own localities, but need detailed public expenditure information and political space to conduct an effective oversight role -- has become increasingly popular. Advocates point to a whole slew of new studies in Kenya, Brazil, Uganda, and India:

Deininger, Klaus, and Paul Mpuga. 2005. Does Greater Accountability Improve the Quality of Public Service Delivery? Evidence from Uganda. World Development 33(1): 171–191.
Björkman, Martina, and Jakob Svensson. 2009. Power to the People: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment on Community-Based Monitoring in Uganda. Quarterly Journal of Economics 124: 735–769
Duflo, Esther, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer. 2009. Additional Resources versus Organizational Change in Education: Experimental Evidence from Kenya. MIT Working paper.
Ferraz, Claudio and Frederico Finan. 2008. Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil’s Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes. Quarterly Journal of Economics 123(2): 703-745.
Gonçalves, Sónia. 2009. Power to the People: The Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Municipal Expenditures and Infant Mortality in Brazil. LSE Working Paper.
Afridi, Farzana. 2008. Can Community Monitoring Improve the Accountability of. Public Officials? Economic and Political Weekly 43 (42).

Martina Björkman of Bocconi University and Jakob Svensson of Stockholm University provide particularly compelling evidence. In 2004, they collaborated with the World Bank to design and implement a randomized field experiment in 50 Ugandan communities. "In the experiment, local NGOs facilitated village and staff meetings in which members of the communities discussed baseline information on the status of health service delivery relative to other providers and the government standard. Community members were also encouraged to develop a plan identifying key problems and steps the providers should take to improve health service provision. The primary objective of the intervention was to initiate a process of community-based monitoring that was then up to the community to sustain and lead." Here's what they found after one year:

Treatment communities became more engaged and more closely monitored their health service providers.
The practices of health service providers improved significantly in the treatment communities (e.g. increased childhood immunization, improved examination procedures, lower waiting times, lower rates of absenteeism).
The weight of infants improved and under-5 child mortality declined by 33% in the treatment group.
Utilization for general outpatient services was 20% higher in the treatment facilities.

However, there are also reasons to doubt the efficacy of social auditing initiatives. Some scholars warn that the process of community monitoring may be subject to "elite capture." John Sidel of the London School of Economics reports that in Indonesia "economic and political power at the regency, municipal, and provincial levels ... appears to be associated with loosely defined, somewhat shadowy, and rather fluid clusters and cliques of businessmen, politicians, and officials." Scott Fritzen of the National University of Singapore has conducted an evaluation of community-driven development initiatives in 250 Indonesian sub-districts and concluded that "elite control of project decision-making is pervasive." Another group of researchers affiliated with MIT's Poverty Action Lab has evaluated community monitoring interventions in India's primary education sector. They find that, despite significant information disclosure, "community members did not know what they were entitled to, what they were actually getting, and how they could put pressure on the providers."

What then should policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers take away from the existing body of literature? Here are our take-aways:

1) Grassroots monitoring does work in some settings and in some cases it can yield enormous development gains.

2) We need more evidence on the conditions under which community monitoring improves development outcomes. For example, it could be the case that grassroots monitoring is more effective in countries with higher levels of internet or mobile phone penetration. It could also be the case that the civil liberties and media freedoms play a role in determining whether there is sufficient "political space" to sound the alarm when service providers are not delivering. There could also be a supply side dimension: Are domestic CSOs with a significant local presence more effective than international NGOs at mobilizing and coordinating individuals? Are donors, local NGOs, and service providers disclosing the right kinds of information in the right formats (posters, newspapers, mobile phones, internet)?

In its newly-released MDG strategy, the Obama administration underscores the importance of "fund[ing] applied research by supporting local, national, and global research networks working on key problems related to the MDGs." This strikes us as a particularly promising area for applied research that could have an enormous impact on MDG goals related to public service delivery.

3) Those of us who are interested in the prospects for crowd-sourcing aid information need to begin asking hard questions about "necessary and sufficient conditions." We'd encourage readers of this blog to keep an eye out for further discussion of what motivates individuals and institutions to crowd-source information. AidData and BYU's Political Economy & Development Lab are hoping to soon launch a randomized control trial that will test some key hypotheses related to crowd-sourcing effectiveness.

India opens up its aid tap

2010-09-21T18:40:00.000-04:00

Last week, Laura Freschi had a great post over on AidWatch on the Indian response to the withdrawal of British aid, where she mentioned the rise of India as a donor in its own right. This issue has gotten other attention recently, from both the Wall Street Journal and Canada's International Development Research Centre.

Here at AidData, we've been working hard over the last few months to track down project level information on Indian aid. As Laura pointed out, the Indian aid apparatus is still forming, and no central agency has been established. However, we have been able to collect some very basic project level statistics from outcome budgets published by the Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Finance. These documents give brief descriptions of EXIM loans, technical assistance, and direct grants to developing countries. Most of the data bears out what others have reported, that India is primarily focused on its neighbors, including Bhutan, Afghanistan, and Nepal, but also highlights less-intuitive recipients like Ghana and Sudan.

The sectoral breakdown (made possible by our incredible staff of RAs) shows that India has primarily focused on power. transportation, and industry. However, we suspect that many of the projects that we left coded as multi-sector due to the brevity of the descriptions encompass smaller-scale education, health, and social projects.

We're actively pursuing better data from the relevant offices and departments in the Indian government that will allow us to calculate the grant element of loans, provide more detailed purpose codes, and possibly run pilots in geocoding and crowdsourcing. Obviously, any help that any of you users could give us here would be most welcome.
Finally, here's the full list of India projects in AidData:

Aid Shocks Likely Cause Armed Conflict

2010-09-15T14:28:00.000-04:00

The following post was written by Dan Nielson, an AidData PI at Brigham Young University, and Tara Candland, a BYU graduate now working as a consultant for Development Initiatives.

In 1990, Tuareg rebels launched a civil war against the Malian government that lasted six years and killed hundreds of people. Greed, grievances, ethnic tensions, climate stress, and government failure all contributed. But it turns out that foreign aid – or rather its sudden disappearance – provided the spark that set the tinder ablaze.

Tuareg nomads had become accustomed to receiving aid to offset drought and desertification in the 1970s and 1980s. But in 1989 the aid dried up quite suddenly, the government lost its ability to appease the Tuareg, and the rebels took up arms.

This pattern of violence following aid shortfalls seems to be a recurring pattern globally. In a forthcoming article to appear in the American Journal of Political Science, lead authors and AidData veterans Richard Nielsen (Harvard) and Michael Findley (BYU), along with Zachary Davis (BYU) and the two of us, found that severe decreases in foreign aid – what we call “aid shocks” – significantly heightened the probability of armed conflict in recipient countries.

Those familiar with the extant political science literature can take a look at the manuscript but for the rest of us, the logic is still relatively simple. Recipient governments at times divert significant shares of foreign aid – which in some countries exceeds all other sources of government revenue – to bolster military strength. Such strengthened armies ought to deter rebellion. In addition, recipient governments can use aid to make side payments to buy acquiescence from potential rebels. In either situation, when a sudden, unexpected aid shock occurs, the balance of power shifts in favor of the rebels, creating an opportunity for the rebels to strike.

But war is expensive both in monetary and human terms, and rarely do the benefits outweigh the high costs. What is more, both governments and rebels generally know this fact. So why not simply negotiate a new accord that favors the relatively strengthened rebels?

We argue that any such deal simply would not prove credible. Donors may renew foreign aid flows in the future, and the newly strengthened governments would then face strong incentives to renege on the old agreement. Foreseeing this, rebels should reject any deal from governments in the face of aid shocks and take the opportunity to strike while the government is relatively weak.

The evidence for this pattern is strong. Coupling AidData with the Uppsala conflict statistics, we paired the recipients that experienced aid shocks with nearly identical countries that did not. Using this “matching” method, we could treat the data much more as if it were the result of an experiment rather than simple statistical observation.

The results give us greater confidence that aid shocks actually cause armed conflict. And they also persuade us that donors are not merely reducing aid in anticipation of future violence.

We even find that the patterns hold when we set the threshold for aid shocks anywhere between the 10th and 25th percentiles. That is, when we define aid shocks as the most severe 10 percent of negative downturns in aid and below, and when we set it relatively high at the most negative 25 percent of shocks and below, we get statistically similar results.

The estimated effect of aid shocks with different percentile cut-offs used to define shocks

So how can we stop these aid shocks and possibly prevent violence? The implication is clear: foreign aid needs to be made more transparent and more consistent so that recipient governments can plan their expenditures, and donors should be more aware of the dangers of withdrawing aid suddenly, particularly in countries already prone to violent conflict. Much debate has raged over whether or not foreign aid is effective at achieving development results. But our research suggests that, even if aid proves entirely ineffective at relieving poverty or promoting economic growth, withdrawing it suddenly might lead to violent conflict.

New MDG Strategy Document Signals USG Commitment to Aid Transparency

2010-09-13T11:33:00.000-04:00

The following was written by Brad Parks, an AidData Principal Investigator and Research Associate at The College of William and Mary...

One week from today, President Obama is expected to deliver a major speech on U.S. global development policy at a United Nations Summit on the Millennium Development Goals. There is much

speculation about whether the President's speech will coincide with the release of the State Department's long-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). However, those chomping at the bit to gain some initial insight into the administration's priorities should read the new USG strategy to meet the MDGs.

Several excerpts stand out as promising signals of the Obama administration's commitment to aid transparency, data collection, and the use of innovative technologies (e.g. crowd-sourcing and geo-referencing tools):
"Innovation, which is at the heart of the strategy, can be a powerful force multiplier when combined with other investments. Drawing on America’s long tradition of development through innovation, we will increase funding for applied research, expand access to effective existing technologies and practices, build learning partnerships, stimulate innovation in partner countries, and expand global access to knowledge."
"We will support efforts to improve our ability to track progress on the MDGs, including the World Bank’s Mapping for Results effort to develop interactive mapping of the Goals. The initiative will provide information at the sub‐national level to allow tracking of the relationships between aid flows, public expenditures, and poverty and other development indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy."
"Our commitment to sustainability and innovation will be underpinned by a relentless commitment to measuring results. To this end, we will upgrade our institutional capacity to monitor and measure development outcomes, as well as support and learn from centers of best practice in evaluation. We will ensure that our presidential initiatives have strong monitoring and evaluation functions, and we will continue to call for the same in the multilateral organizations we support. We will help sponsor new methods and data collection initiatives to improve how we measure progress toward the MDGs."
"We will support principles to strengthen the ability to track, monitor, and report on progress by making donor commitments clearly defined, results‐oriented, and time bound. These principles are central to the credibility of mutliateral fora, just as commitments to good governance are essential for the credibility of partner governments. The G8 Accountability Report in 2010 was critical step forward, and one on which we intend to build. Meanwhile, we will put in place a new framework on aid effectiveness to guide our efforts. We will start by launching a major aid transparency initiative. In collaboration with U.S. agencies, other donors, and partner governments, we will identify the most appropriate timelines and channels to disseminate country‐level information about aid flows. After undertaking country pilots, the approach may then be scaled up. We will also seek to establish common reporting frameworks and develop an Aid Dashboard that allows stakeholders to visualize U.S. foreign assistance investments by geographic area or sector, see the details of specific projects, and track trends over time.
We are very excited to see that the USG recognized the value of Aiddata's "Mapping for Results" partnership with the World Bank. This strategy document is also good news for people interested in aid transparency and aid effectiveness. If the USG gets on the aid transparency bandwagon, it could be a huge boost for the International Aid Transparency Initiative and broader efforts to strengthen the feedback loop between donors and intended beneficiaries. We look forward to seeing more concrete plans from the Obama administration.

South-North Cooperation? Hurricane Katrina and the US as an aid recipient

2010-09-02T15:16:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, we here at AidData have made it a priority to pursue information on emerging donors and South-South Cooperation partners. We've seen how Arab donors can have a huge impact in a single country, or how Brazil is leveraging comparative advantages from its own experience to assist other developing countries. But there's one unique case that stands out from all the rest, allowing us to add a new donor and a new recipient in one blow.

Last year, we stumbled across the Qatar Katrina Fund, which was established a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast 5 years ago this week. The government of Qatar allocated $100 million to health, education, and housing projects across the Gulf Coast. Not only did they allocate the money, but they were transparent through the entire process, publishing extensive project descriptions, maps, and audits of their work.

You can view these projects through the AidData Search Result Widget right here. Hopefully the benefit of the Fund's work will go beyond its immediate grantees and serve as another demonstration of the power of transparency.