News and Features

Fourth AMP Best Practices Workshop Held In Dakar

The 4^th Aid Management Platform (AMP) Best Practices Workshop was held from Jan. 24-26 in Dakar, Senegal. More than 90 people attended from nineteen AMP countries, eight partner organizations, and several observer countries.

In the past year, several major developments have transformed aid management and many of these changes were at the heart of workshop discussions. As the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has grown, countries have been eager to learn how the new data can be integrated into the Aid Management Platform. Other advances in integrating monitoring and evaluation features into the system and technologies to geocode aid activities were featured at the workshop. Halima Wagao, an Aid Coordination Officer from Tanzania, said “The workshop was very informative and motivated us to be not only technicians, but also to play a vital role in policy making.”

Looking ahead, the work on integrating IATI feeds into the AMP system will soon move forward in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). An upcoming IATI mission will begin to test automatic feeds to the Plateforme pour la Gestion de l’Aide et des Investissements (PGAI), as AMP is known locally. Currently 50% of the national budget in the DRC comes from aid flows which are managed by three separate ministries. With integration of IATI data, the information tracked in the PGAI will be more comprehensive, higher quality, and easier for other ministries to use. All of this will help the government plan its budgets better. This approach will soon be tested in other countries as well, giving stakeholders a clearer idea of amounts of on and off-budget aid.

See pictures from the workshop and other photos from Development Gateway’s work on our new Flickr photostream.

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Honduras Becomes First AMP Country in Central America

Honduras recently became the first country in Central America and the second middle-income country to use the Aid Management Platform (AMP, or Plataforma de Gestión de la Ayuda in Spanish). During this initial pilot phase of the project, eleven people from the government’s Secretaría Técnica de Planificación y Cooperación Externa (SEPLAN) have been certified to use the system and four people have become certified administrators.

Government officials were eager to begin using AMP to manage the aid the country receives. During the implementation, data were transferred from an existing database to AMP. Then, using mapping tools initially developed and piloted for the government of Liberia, the projects in the platform were mapped for the first time. With the data mapped, the AMP users can see the volume and types of projects underway around the country.

The project was funded by UNDP, CIDA, the EC, and the Government of Honduras. The government officials involved in the project have shown considerable investment in the platform and hope to launch AMP to the public this year.

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Open Development Technology Alliance

Development Gateway is proud to be a member of the Open Development Technology Alliance (ODTA). The ODTA uses technology to promote government accountability and to improve public service delivery. ODTA works on transparency and participatory processes through knowledge, people, and tools.

Currently, the ODTA has an open invitation for feedback on some of its research. Seven papers on topics such as open government and crowdsourcing for accountability, the use of ICTs for transparency and accountability, and other related topics are available for public review. After a three month period, the authors of the report will adapt their report to reflect lessons learned from the public comment period and the final drafts will be published. Read the documents and provide your input here.

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Stories from the Field

AMP Best Practices Workshop

This Story from the Field comes from Djamila Kerim, a Development Gateway Senior Associate working on the Aid Management Program:

This year, I was able to attend the AMP workshop for a second time. The program is growing both with respect to the number of people participating, and the scope of activities we are discussing. This year, there were more than 90 participants from more than 20 countries. Many of them are beginning to see the potential to use AMP as much more than a computer system and more as a process of managing aid flows effectively.

During the conference, we were able to interview several of the participants. They mentioned how happy they were to attend the conference and several of them commented that they felt like they were part of a family through AMP. In fact, I interviewed some of the participants from countries that do not have AMP and they said they wanted to be able to join the “AMP family.”

Eight partner organizations were present during the workshop. Many of them gave good presentations that allowed the attendees to talk directly with the experts about the latest technologies to improve aid management. The attendees responded very well to this this. For example, following a presentation by Esri, two of the countries immediately started working towards geocoding their AMP data.

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