News and Features

Announcing the Winner of the 2011 Photo Contest

Congratulations to Seshadri Moitra, winner of the 2011 Development Gateway Photo Contest, for the photo “Creative Art,” taken in a village in West Bengal, India. According to the photographer, it depicts the small scale industry of making historical posters or calendars, and symbolizes the community’s efforts to achieve development through enterprise. The photo contest kicked off in September along with the launch of the new Development Gateway website, and called on photographers to submit images of people in developing countries working to build a better world. Over 400 photographers entered the contest, and the winner was chosen from among five finalists through a public vote.

The new Development Gateway website features a map of where we work around the world, with links to stories and news about these projects. You can watch interviews with country counterparts for several Aid Management Platform (AMP) implementations, including Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Malawi. For a brief intro to Development Gateway’s work, check out the presentation here, and for a more in-depth look, read the Annual Report. We welcome comments and suggestions to improve the website—please email them to ekallaur@developmentgateway.org.

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AidData Launches New Website

AidData previewed its new website at an event on Nov. 4, organized by AidData, the World Bank Institute, and the Robert S. Strauss Center for International 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 brought policymakers, technologists, development practitioners, and researchers together to discuss the open data movement and how it is impacting development work.

In his keynote address, Richard Manning—former chair of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee—set the context for the day’s discussions. He noted that the transparency agenda was largely absent from the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness framework, but that then-President of the World Bank James Wolfensohn had emphasized it at the 2003 Rome High Level Forum, and it has since reemerged as a major theme. Mr. Manning argued that "infomediaries," such as AidData, will play a key role in making the deluge of public data more accessible and understandable.

Other speakers throughout the day discussed the need for greater aid transparency and hyper-local data, ways of tracking aid information, monitoring climate change-related finance, and closing the feedback loop between donors and other aid stakeholders. A number of fascinating new initiatives to make aid information more useful as a tool for research, policymaking, and grassroots monitoring were demonstrated. You can watch videos and download all the presentations from the conference online.

The new AidData website features more content and new data and marks an expansion in the program’s mission and scope. It highlights innovative projects to find new ways of gathering, managing, and visualizing development finance information, such as geocoding and crowdsourcing. Maps that show the geographical distribution of specific donor-funded activities offer a powerful way to help decision makers and citizens ask the right questions about aid allocation and effectiveness.

There are also many new data resources available on the AidData site, including AidData Raw, a new repository of stand-alone datasets that have not yet been vetted for inclusion in the main AidData database, as well as some that contain other types of aid information that are not suitable for inclusion. Researchers will find a new collection of replication datasets associated with influential aid allocation and effectiveness studies, as well as many other new datasets. Finally, the main AidData database has been updated to include the latest release of the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System data, as well as some additional data sources.

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AMP 2.0 Implemented in Three Countries

Development Gateway has now installed the next generation Aid Management Platform, AMP 2.0, in three countries—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Togo, and Nepal. The new version features an improved user interface, a new public view, and sector, region, and donor profiles (first image below) to serve as dashboards for analysts and decision-makers.

Now, governments can import information in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data format directly into AMP, which will become increasingly important now that 28 donors have pledged to provide information following this standard. This feature was informed by an IATI pilot, conducted by Development Gateway in collaboration with aidinfo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in October.

Advanced interactive maps are also available (next image below), using cutting-edge technology from Esri to show the subnational location of aid activities. This allows governments and donors to quickly assess whether aid is being allocated to the areas of greatest need.

The AMP team has been busy in other countries as well, with recent pilot implementations in Guinea-Bissau and Uganda. The full AMP interface is now available in Portuguese. In Timor-Leste, the Minister of Finance launched AMP at the Quarterly Development Partners meeting in October, where Development Gateway has been working with the government on data validation and a feasibility study on linking AMP to the government’s FreeBalance financial management system (in the photo below, the Development Gateway team is pictured with Her Excellency Emilia Pires, the Minister of Finance, and Arlindo da Cruz Monteiro, the government’s AMP project manager).

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Development Gateway Participates in Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness

Last week, the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness was held in Busan, South Korea.

In an interview with the Inter Press Service, Development Gateway CEO Jean-Louis Sarbib hailed the inclusiveness of the forum, with traditional donors acknowledging the broad range of actors now involved in development. The importance of South-South cooperation, he noted, was also recognized.

Aid transparency was a major theme at the forum, as donors have made significant progress in this area, and the momentum on increasing transparency could make other aid effectiveness goals more achievable. The US, Canada, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Fund for Agriculture and Development signed on to the International Aid Transparency Initiative in Busan. The IATI donor signatories, now at 28, account for more than three-fourths of global development assistance.

During the forum, Development Gateway led an interactive workshop on geocoding aid activities, giving participants the opportunity to try new tools for making aid information more accessible and transparent. In a side event co-organized by Development Gateway along with the World Bank Institute, aidinfo, and UNICEF, the World Bank launched the Open Aid Partnership, which builds on the Mapping for Results initiative. “What we’ve seen is that mapping aid is a powerful way to convince many different types of stakeholders of the benefits of open information,” said Mr. Sarbib. “If you have data from lots of donors in a standard format, so that you are comparing apples to apples, it becomes relatively easy to see the real picture of where aid is going, and to start asking questions about whether it could be allocated more effectively.”

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CCAPS Unveils New Mapping Dashboard in Durban, Featuring Geocoded Malawi Aid Data

Last week at the COP17 climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, AidData’s partners at the Strauss Center’s Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program unveiled their new mapping dashboard which combines information on climate vulnerability, armed conflict, and aid to Malawi. In the coming months, the dashboard will be expanded in both functionality and data coverage to include aid data across Africa (with data from the World Bank and African Development Bank, now available through AidData Raw), data on governance indicators, and the SCAD data set on social conflict in Africa. These datasets represent the four pillars addressed by CCAPS’s work: climate vulnerability, armed conflict, governance, and foreign aid.

The Climate Change and African Political Stability Program is a five-year research program at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, partnered with the College of William and Mary, Trinity College Dublin, and University of North Texas. CCAPS analyzes how climate change, conflict, governance, and aid intersect to impact African and international security. CCAPS is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative.

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Stories from the Field

Geocoding Hits the Ground

This Story from the Field comes from Joshua Powell, a Business Development Associate with Development Gateway focusing on AidData and geocoding work:

Over the past two years, I have been able to watch AidData’s geocoding efforts grow from an isolated research program into the celebrated Mapping for Results partnership with the World Bank Institute, and the African Development Bank pilot mapping program. During this time, I have heard repeatedly about how these maps would improve division of labor, decrease funding gaps, and improve aid effectiveness. However, these conversations had always been held in offices and conferences in DC, London, and California. It seemed that it was time for geocoding to grow again – this time from an intellectual exercise in transparency to a practical exercise in improving the value and efficiency of aid efforts.

This fall, I was able to participate in what is likely the first step in this transition from focusing on “top-down” transparency to “bottom-up” results. Our partners in the Malawi Ministry of Finance explained to us how having these detailed, sub-national maps available would help them to work with their donor partners in improving coordination and aid targeting. More importantly, integrating geocoding with AMP and developing local capacity for mapping could provide the sustainability to allow for better project planning and transparency over time. The 14 donors that we presented the mapping to saw the same potential for in-country usefulness of the mapped data and agreed to provide the necessary information to move the process forward.

While promising, this trip pointed to the amount of work that lies ahead for aid mapping to reach the “end users” of aid. When the Malawi Ministry of Finance presented our joint work (done in cooperation with the Strauss Center’s CCAPS program—see previous article) in Busan, it demonstrated the feasibility of two of the four key uses of geocoding: aid transparency and country aid management. However, there is still much to be done on the other two fronts: project monitoring and evaluation, and recipient-sourced feedback. It is exciting to see this project moving from mapping inputs toward assessing results.

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