Geocoding in Malawi
Mapping Malawi’s Aid Portfolio
An Exercise in Transparency, Division of Labor, and Assessing Results
To achieve the objectives of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, partner countries and other aid stakeholders must have full access to information on where donors are operating and in what sectors.
In response to the demand for increased transparency and improved geographic funding information, the Ministry of Finance of Malawi has partnered with Development Gateway, AidData and the Robert S. Strauss Center’s Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program at the University of Texas to better identify aid efforts aimed at reducing poverty, addressing climate change, improving infrastructure, health, or education, and increasing government capacity.
Geocoding, or mapping the locations of donor project activities, provides one of the most promising ways in which donors and partner countries can coordinate their efforts, inform the public of their activities, and deepen country ownership. Mapping projects can improve aid targeting by highlighting geographic funding gaps, improve donor coordination by highlighting all donor activities, and provide governments with a platform to assess total resource allocation at a sub-national level.
This joint effort to track the allocation of aid in Malawi builds on the Mapping for Results initiative. Mapping for Results, the first effort of its kind, is a joint collaboration between AidData and the World Bank to map all active World Bank projects around the globe. It uses the geo-referencing methodology developed by AidData in collaboration with Uppsala University’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP).
While unprecedented, Mapping for Results represents only a starting point for the geocoding and open data movement by tracking the efforts of a single donor. While this is an important step, the returns from mapping additional donors will be significant as it will provide a more complete picture of the development efforts within a country.
The Ministry of Finance of Malawi led the efforts to geocode the aid activities of 29 donors within the Malawi Aid Management Platform. Mapping this information empowers stakeholders by enabling them to better understand the allocation of development assistance. For aid donors, this means the ability to better coordinate and harmonize aid efforts. This not only increases the potential effectiveness of efforts, but also allows donors to cut down on duplicate efforts, and direct aid to underserved areas instead. Moreover, the UCDP/AidData geocoding methodology has become a key component of the geocoding standard being developed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI was created to address the need for better aid information, and has worked to establish common data standards for information on aid activities across donors and partner countries. By geocoding Malawi’s project in this standard way, the resulting data can be compared with or analyzed against data from the World Bank and other donors.
The impact on recipient communities is potentially significant. Mapping aid flows empowers recipient communities to understand potential financing gaps or inequalities of aid distribution. This is particularly important for those populations most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change. This is a step towards ensuring that donors are responding to local needs. By displaying climate-aid projects on top of climate vulnerability maps, we take one step toward creating a stronger feedback loop between policymakers and citizens on the ground. Those in the development community can better assess the targeting of aid by examining whether it is allocated to the most vulnerable populations within a country. Mapping aid flows is the first step in empowering stakeholders to effectively respond and adapt to the threats of climate change.
In addition to geocoding these projects from AMP Malawi, the research teams at CCAPS and AidData are collaborating to more precisely define the sectoral focus of each aid project, and to determine whether projects are targeted to help populations adapt to the growing threat of climate change. However, simply identifying what projects count as climate aid is not enough. There is a growing need to understand where the effects of climate change will be greatest in order to effectively target adaptation activities. Are the areas deemed most vulnerable to climate shocks being accurately identified and supported by international efforts? CCAPS researchers are working to generate climate vulnerability maps at the sub-national level that take into account the complex political, social, economic and ecological drivers of climate change vulnerability. The resulting composite maps shed light on the multifaceted nature of climate vulnerability and the challenge at hand.
By providing geocoded project data combined with sub-national indicators of need, the partnership is demonstrating the viability of the concept of multi-donor mapping, with true country ownership. The geocoded data set will be made public and will be used by the Malawi Ministry of Finance to generate aid reports, catalyze new conversations with its donor partners, and improve aid effectiveness at the local level across the country. A new mapping tool also allows anyone to interact with the data online.
