Intern blog: Haiti & aid transparency

With warmer weather and the rainy season on the way, celebrities are also joining in on efforts to provide Haiti with basic supplies, such as waterproof tents. Although aid to Haiti is clearly still much needed, aid workers and politicians are having difficulty agreeing on what will best deliver a speedy recovery and overall improvement in the country's economic, social, and institutional development. So what will have the greatest impact? Investment in education, as Canadian governor Michaelle Jean says? Or as Nancy Birdsall argues, allowing more Haitians in the United States so they can bring back the expertise they gain abroad? How should donors and the Haitian government prioritize and allocate funds towards immediate needs and long-term development goals?

Amidst these debates, the broader issues of aid effectiveness are brought to the forefront. What have donors promised and what are the actual results? How can countries become active participants in the aid process? Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has stated his commitment to transparency, a vital part in ensuring that the large amounts of aid flowing into the devastated country are used to promote recovery. Development Gateway and its partners are also working towards this end by providing a system that allows the Haitian government to track damage reports. With technology bringing the world closer together, it's certainly much simpler to get information out there to those who need it. No wonder that ICT is one of the fastest growing sectors in development.

AidData: Aid Transparency in Action

This week has been very exciting for those of us here at Development Gateway, particularly the AidData team. After nearly seven years in development, the AidData web portal---along with its nearly 1 million development assistance activity records---was finally made available to the public. The beta version of the site allows users to search for detailed information on aid activities from 80 donor governments and multilateral organizations worldwide. AidData was revealed midway through the Aid Transparency and Development Finance: Issues and Insights from AidData conference that took place over three days at University College in Oxford. Participants engaged in lively discussion about the web portal, data standards, aid transparency, and the 24 papers and numerous presentations of cutting-edge research using AidData. Anyone interested could also attend a demonstration of how to use the tool to answer their own questions about development finance.

The best news for the team, however, has been the overwhelmingly positive feedback that AidData has gotten since going public. In its first week, the website had over 30,000 hits and AidData has been mentioned in dozens of high-profile blogs and news outlets as a positive influence on aid transparency and effectiveness.

To check out AidData, go to www.AidData.org.

Intern blog: Aid Information Challenge

If you've been following our Twitter, you may know that we're holding an unconference/bar camp, Aid Information Challenge, this month to discuss how data can used to improve aid efficiency. Development Gateway's databases compile information about international aid so that it's more accessible to international development professionals, but also the public. AidData, which is a database of extensive statistical data on international aid, will also be launched in March at Oxford in conjunction with BYU and William & Mary. So it's a pretty exciting time for Development Gateway!

In the process, I've been spreading the word and got to thinking about the core purpose of these events. There seems to be a general consensus now that transparency is crucial for development aid. Not only are we striving to do this with our programs and technology, but we are also trying to achieve this through the unconference. In a field or within an organization, encouraging dialogue and input is a great way to facilitate new ideas.  We're providing the statistics and data and you can help us come up with effective ways to use and implement it!

My life as a Development Gateway intern

Hi, readers!

My name is Regina, a first year graduate student pursuing a master's in international policy and development at Georgetown. Prior to graduate school, I graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in international relations. My academic interests led me to Development Gateway where I've been working as a communications intern.

What does the communications team do, you ask? Mostly we inform people, such as those in the international development community, about the organization through social media and other channels, such as press releases. As you may know, Development Gateway uses information technology for international development, so it makes sense that social media would be an extremely useful tool for us. I monitor Twitter so that our followers are up to date on our activities, but I also keep track of relevant blogs, Twitter users, news, and research so that followers can also see issues that we (and hopefully they) are interested in and involved with, such as aid effectiveness, donor-recipient partnerships, and aid transparency.

In addition to getting to know several active members and organizations in international development via Twitter, I've learned about the various programs going on at Development Gateway, such as AMP and AidData (check for updates on AidData on Twitter in the next few months!), to have a more complete idea of the inner workings and general mission of the organization. All in all, it's been a great learning experience so far with awesome people and interesting work!

More next week! In the meantime, check out our tweets @DGateway for recent developments, program news and general musings about international aid.

Tame the beast

A recent article in The Economist about data and transparency addresses the possible downsides of open government data. While the article sites some positive examples of efforts governments have made to make data more open, it acknowledges that, “whatever governments do, the presentation of endless facts can fall flat unless there are independent developers who know what to do with them.”

Even people used to dealing with data can be overwhelmed by all the raw stuff. In March Development Gateway is launching AidData, a repository that tracks more than 1 million projects spanning 81 donor agencies and totaling more than $4.1 trillion dollars over 40 years. Although clearly a rich source of information, one researcher who got a sneak preview of the database characterized it as an “unwieldy monster.”

Such a reaction didn’t surprise us. We know that it will take a variety of tools and a multi-disciplinary approach to make the data meaningful to a broad range of people. Toward that end, we are holding the Aid Information Challenge, an informal conference to bring together software developers and development practitioners to come up with applications that will make the data easier to access and more helpful to users. This event, held at the World Bank on March 12, is co-sponsored by AidInfo, ForumOne, and the World Bank. This video explains the purpose of the event. To register for the Aid Information Challenge, and help us tame the beast, click here.

The public launch of AidData will take place at the Aid Transparency and Development Finance conference in Oxford, U.K., March 22 – 25. Read more about AidData here.