January 2012

New Research Briefs Describe Recent Findings Using the AidData Database

In an effort to make research that uses the AidData database more accessible, AidData researchers have produced a series of research briefs summarizing recent publications. These briefs are intended to give aid practitioners, the general public, and researchers more information about current projects and findings. Two new briefs have recently been added to the collection.

One of the newly-released briefs summarizes a publication by Sven Wilson published in a special issue of World Development in November 2011. The paper finds that development assistance for health spent between 1975 and 2005 is not responsible for the declining mortality rates seen in many recipient countries. Rather, it seems, this funding seems to flow to places that are already having success. The results hold against a wide range of robustness tests. The brief can be found here.

A second brief summarizes work by Zachary Christensen, Dustin Homer, and Daniel Nielson that was also published in the special issue of World Development in November 2011. This paper examined the impact of aid projects in the education sector. They find that multilateral donors were more effective at boosting primary enrollment rates than bilateral donors. The difference between the two types of organizations seems to be the ability of multilateral donors to condition their aid on the governance of the recipient country. The brief can be found here.

Other briefs available on the AidData site include one that examines the impact of sudden drops in aid on violent armed conflict, whether aid to different sectors is more likely to deter terrorism, how Arab donors have (or have not) changed their behavior as their wealth has increased, and how the location of aid projects within a country influences conflicts in those countries.

Dakar, Senegal: Country Representatives Discuss Aid Information at Annual Workshop

From January 24-26 in Dakar, Senegal, representatives from 24 countries gathered to discuss many of the latest innovations in tracking development finance. The annual workshop, held this year for the fourth time, is a chance for government officials that use the Aid Management Platform (AMP) implemented by Development Gateway to talk about their experiences and challenges in managing aid information. Discussions range beyond the use of the system, and provide an opportunity for country representatives to share practical ideas about what works and what is needed in the realm of aid transparency more broadly.

One session focused on geocoding as a tool to make aid information more useful for planning and decision making. Members of the AidData team presented their work with the Government of Malawi and the Robert S. Strauss Center’s Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program at the University of Texas-Austin to geocode all activities in AMP Malawi. Participants also discussed the impact of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) on aid management. In particular, one panel presented a recent pilot project to integrate data in the IATI format into the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Aid Management Platform. Looking ahead, participants weighed options for better integrating monitoring and evaluation data into the aid management process.

What Do Subnational Data Tell Us about Aid Effectiveness?

Conventional wisdom holds that effective donor coordination is key to maximizing aid effectiveness. To date, much research on donor coordination has focused on aid aggregated at the country level. In a new working paper, two AidData-affiliated researchers, Michael Findley from BYU and Joshua Powell from Development Gateway, explore donor coordination at the subnational level. Recent geocoding efforts have generated rich data on the location of World Bank and African Development Bank projects that can be used for this kind of spatial analysis.

The paper addresses a few major questions: Do donors—in this case, the World Bank and African Development Bank—cluster their projects where need is greatest, and spread projects out where need is less acute? Do donors who co-finance projects coordinate better to be more responsive to need? The authors examine projects in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique, the DRC, and Ethiopia and find that in some countries the donors seem to coordinate better than in others. Part of this variation can be explained by the level of co-financing between the two institutions. The working paper, The Swarm Principle? A Spatial Analysis of Donor Coordination in Sub-Saharan Africa, can be accessed here and data from AidData’s mapping projects can be found here.

Highlights

The recent release by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group of project success ratings provides rich data about aid effectiveness. A series of posts on the AidData blog, the First Tranche, has explored the dataset from a few different angles. Earlier this month, Ben Buch and Doug Nicholson, AidData Research Assistants at the College of William and Mary, asked what factors help predict the outcomes of World Bank projects. They looked at two variables, the quality of monitoring and evaluation and the quality of project supervision. They found that there was a strong link between these measures and project outcomes, with more successful projects generally having good supervision. Read the entire post here.

In a subsequent post, Dylan Marry, an AidData Research Assistant, and Chris Salvi, an AidData Intern, both from William and Mary, used regression analysis to find a strong correlation between the quality of supervision and project outcomes. They then used several variables from the International Country Risk Guide to explore the link between political and socioeconomic variables on project supervision and project outcomes. They found that countries with better socioeconomic conditions tend to have better supervision. They also found that although the stability of the recipient country does not seem to impact project outcomes, other factors including socioeconomic conditions, corruption, quality of bureaucratic institutions, and democratic accountability do seem to have an influence. Read the full blog post here.

Also on the First Tranche, Daniel Gamboa Galvez, a Visiting Research Associate at AidData, and Jaclyn Goldschmidt, an AidData Research Assistant, looked at the example of Venezuela’s South-South development cooperation with Nicaragua as a case for greater transparency among middle and low-income countries who are increasingly participating in global development finance. While South-South cooperation is increasingly influential, many donors are hesitant to be transparent.

What's Hot

The Brookings Institution recently hosted an event on aid transparency where Rajiv Shah, the administrator of USAID, spoke about aid transparency within the broader set of reforms necessary to make USAID more accountable and transparent. He said that there were several key components of these efforts: implementing the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), reducing tied aid, and increasing reliance on local partner organizations. The event also featured a panel discussion with representatives from Publish What You Fund, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, and Brookings discussing the various dimensions of aid transparency. One key insight from this discussion was that increased donor transparency could help the public understand how little aid is spent relative to perceptions, which could lead to greater public support for aid spending in donor countries.

David Roodman of the Center for Global Development published a book Due Diligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance which assesses the effectiveness of microfinance. Microfinance has been a popular development activity over the past couple decades--at least 635 projects in the AidData database contain microfinance components. Recently, however, the microfinance industry has faced significant criticism. Roodman evaluates these criticisms with an effort to be balanced. He says that microfinance has largely failed to lift people out of poverty and that its ability to improve the freedoms of recipients has been mixed. However, microfinance has succeeded at creating a large, sustainable industry where it has in some respects had a positive impact. More information about the book can be found here.

AidData by the Numbers

AidData Raw contains a downloadable dataset from the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) that contains all World Bank project assessments carried out by the IEG since the 1970s. How did World Bank projects do? Project performance breaks down as follows:

Highly Satisfactory: 5%
Satisfactory: 64%
Moderately Satisfactory: 9%
Moderately Unsatisfactory: 4%
Unsatisfactory: 18%
Highly Unsatisfactory: 1%