AidData

AidData
Motto Open data for international development
Formation March 23, 2009
Type Aid Transparency, Information Technology, Geocoding
Headquarters Williamsburg, VA
Location
Website www.aiddata.org

AidData is a research and innovation lab located at the College of William & Mary that seeks to make development finance more transparent, accountable, and effective.The AidData website provides access to development finance activity records from most official aid donors. The AidData portal provides access to development finance activities from 1945 to the present from 95 donor agencies. In addition, the AidData program works on other projects that make it easier to access and analyze aid information, such as the World Bank Institute’s Mapping for Results Initiative and the Development Loop application.

History

AidData was formed in 2009 as a partnership between Brigham Young University (BYU), the College of William and Mary, and Development Gateway. The organization was formed through the merger of two prior initiatives: Project-Level Aid (PLAID) and Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA). PLAID, conceived in 2003, was a joint effort between BYU and William and Mary to provide data on foreign aid. AiDA was established in 2001 by Development Gateway to serve as a registry of aid activities to improve aid transparency and coordination. The organization released their searchable data portal of one million past and present development finance activities from over 90 funding agencies.

In 2016, the members of the AidData partnership came to an agreement that AidData would function moving forward as a stand-alone development research and innovation lab at the College of William and Mary. AidData maintains strong working relationships with their co-founders Development Gateway and Brigham Young University, and these organizations continue to support and contribute to AidData’s work, including as members of the AidData Center for Development Policy.

Information Tools and Resources

A screenshot of the AidData data interface, which allows users to search through development aid projects based on specific criteria, such as donor, recipient, project purpose and activities, and year.

AidData’s online resources include:

Aid Information in AidData Database

AidData’s main tabledatabase includes data from 96 donor agencies and multilateral organizations from 1945 to the present.[1] Most of the aid activity records are republished with permission from the Creditor Reporting System (CRS), the central database for foreign aid compiled by the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which is the official source of aid statistics for all DAC member countries. The database also includes information on the aid projects of some donors that do not report to the OECD, such as Brazil, South Africa, and China. The aid activities are classified according to a scheme that is based on the CRS codebook,[2] but adds individual activity codes under each purpose code headline. The beta version of the AidData portal was launched in March 2010 conference in Oxford, UK. AidData 2.0 was launched in November 2011 at the World Bank.

A number of donors use the International development markup language (IDML) to report directly to AidData.

Geocoding

In collaboration with Uppsala University, AidData developed the UCDP/AidData methodology for geocoding aid activities. The methodology is used to tag development aid activities with geographic coordinates, such that they can be pinpointed to geographic locations and displayed on a map. In partnership with the World Bank,[3] AidData applied this methodology to the Mapping for Results initiative, through which geocoders mapped out more than 16,000 project locations for more than 2,700 active Bank activities across 81 countries, including all IDA recipient countries.[4]

The UCDP/AidData Geocoding Methodology can be freely downloaded on the Open.AidData website.

Publications based on AidData

Publications based on AidData resources include:

AidData is used as a source in the following publications:

References

  1. ↑ http://aiddata.org/content/index/about/faq
  2. ↑
  3. ↑ Kanani, Rahim. "Aleem Walji of the World Bank Institute's Innovation Team on the Future of International Development" Huffington Post. May 5, 2011.
  4. ↑ Kessler, Sarah. "The World Bank Shows Where $168 Billion Goes With Interactive Map". Mashable. April 20, 2011. .

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, March 07, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.