The AidData Center for Development Policy made tremendous progress towards its topline programmatic goal of enabling the international development community to improve geographic targeting, planning, and coordination of development programs. This goal was achieved through the development of foundational processes that will be employed throughout the five-year partnership with USAID. The results of this effort will be the production of a vast information infrastructure of publicly available geocoded aid information needed for high-quality research, advocacy, and evidence-based decision making.
The AidData Center refined its approach of working with developing country governments and country-specific donor offices to geocode current and historical development activities within the host government’s aid information management system. This effort included the completion of geocoding work in Nepal and the Ministry of Finance in Nepal, resulting in the release of a rich data set of more than 21,500 geocoded project locations via a public aid management portal (AMP). AidData Center student researchers also initiated geocoding project records within the AidData.org web portal, coding 6,900 project records in FY2013.
To make these data more accessible and actionable, the AidData Center worked to develop powerful data-driven software tools. Significant upgrades were implemented to the AMP Advanced GIS Module, Geocoding Toolkit, and AidData.org web portal. The upgrades to the AMP GIS Module and Geocoding Toolkit responded to requests from key stakeholders to improve the functionality and usability of these tools to support the geocoded data produced under the HESN program. The AidData Center also overhauled its AidData.org web portal, resulting in the development of AidData 3.0, which will launch in the first quarter of FY2014.
AidData 3.0 will feature an updated data model that can support heterogeneously sourced data structures on several different development finance flows, enhanced project pages that include maps displaying geocoded project data, an advanced GIS portal, and analytic dashboards that will enable users to visualize and export geocoded aid data. The open aid and government movement rests on not just the supply of data, but also in the ability of key stakeholders to leverage this data in aid transparency and development effectiveness efforts.
To build the capacity of stakeholders to use the geocoded data and software tools produced by the AidData Center, 5 Aid Management Fellows were embedded within partner country government aid information management units, and 11 AidData Summer Fellows were deployed to work with civil society organizations in Haiti, Senegal, Mexico, Nepal, and Timor-Leste. These fellows provided trainings on geospatial data management, analysis, and visualization, and built the capacity of their host organizations to use geocoded aid information in their work. The AidData Center also led GIS trainings for development stakeholders in Uganda and Nepal, training 644 development professionals and engaging 220 stakeholder organizations in the use of geocoded aid information in FY2013.