Global significance is often given to the concept of a ‘development expert.’ However, we believe that the best experts are often our partners and clients themselves, who truly understand challenges on the ground, know what works, and know what doesn’t. Through our biennial Aid Management Program (AMP) Good Practices Workshop, we are able to tap into this rich knowledge base, bringing together the experts working on the AMP within each country government.

Tremendous progress has been made over the past two decades in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. Citizens are more aware of the virus, medications have been improved, and access to support has increased. In Côte d’Ivoire, a remaining challenge in combating HIV/AIDS is to more effectively target hotspots and to ensure that resources are finding their way to local communities with the greatest needs for prevention and treatment.

The 2018 Aid Management Program Good Practices Workshop kicks off today in Nairobi, Kenya. We’re looking forward to facilitating open discussion, collaboration, and learning from the 7 country governments and many different types of AMP users that have gathered at the Workshop. This week, we hope to facilitate collaboration across countries, and to gain insight from your shared experiences.

What does it take to design a platform to collect, manage, and analyze a country’s agricultural information? Ideally, a significant amount of time to speak with key data producers and intended data users to understand needs and achieve buy-in. But, as was our experience in Malawi, – it also requires a fair amount of humility and iteration.

One of the central hopes of the IATI initiative was to “make the publish once dream a reality.” We’ve recently concluded work with UNICEF and Development Initiatives, seeking to help UNICEF achieve this dream, and publish their IATI data to country level systems. So did we do it? Did we make the dream a reality?

Recently, we shared a post on how we’re driving progress towards inclusive agriculture data use by strengthening agriculture data interoperability through FHI360’s Mobile Solutions Technical Assistance and Research (mSTAR) project.

This weekend marks the G7 Summit in Canada – as well as the first anniversary of Global Affairs Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy. Over the past year, in Canada and elsewhere, we’ve seen the rights of women and girls grow in prominence across public and development discourse. 

To effectively address nutrition funding shortfalls and develop country-specific investment goals, countries and partners must be able to monitor how much funding is available for nutrition activities. This is a critical step in the nutrition financial tracking cycle (Figure 1), which also includes costing and expenditure tracking.

A few months ago, under the mSTAR project funded by USAID, DG and our partner Athena Infonomics (AI) set out to understand the underlying structure of the data currently being collected and managed by Feed the Future implementers, and how to best support them to open up and share their data through digital tools and best practices.

The 2018 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) took place amidst a striking moment in the news – one that has brought data, especially data privacy, into the spotlight.