Uganda is a country that receives a lot of aid; over $1.7bn in 2009 alone. There’s a simple question to ask: How much aid is going to Uganda, and how large is it compared to government tax revenue? (The ODI looked at all aid to Uganda from 2003-2007, and found double the amount of aid in Uganda compared to what the Ugandan government knew about.)

How much of spending on Health comes from overseas aid versus domestic government revenue. How much on roads, how much on education, how much on security?

These may be simple questions but they turn out to hard, if not impossible, to answer — until now. Over the last 6 months Publish What You Fund and the Open Knowledge Foundation have worked to pull together data from a variety of sources, consolidate it and finally visualize it — with the resulting interactive graphic below.

This visualization shows spending (in Ugandan Shillings) starting from overall budget and then broken down in specific areas such as Education, Health and Security. You can click on a bubble to zoom into that area and see a more detailed breakdown.

In addition, at each level the total amount spent has been broken down by source of funds: Ugandan Government, Budget Support (money from donors given directly to the Ugandan Government for the Government to spend) and direct Donor spending on their own aid projects. This breakdown is visible in the ‘ring’ around each bubble.

About the Data

The full raw data can also be downloaded from this data package on the DataHub — which also includes a full README.

We know this data is still not perfect, so if you have any comments or questions, please get in touch.

We’ll be writing a separate post about the lengthy data-wrangling that went on to get this data into a usable format!

Why this will be easier next time: the International Aid Transparency Initiative

Going forward, we hope no-one will need to do lengthy amount of data-wrangling we had to do to make the data usable. That’s because major donors have committed to publishing to the International Aid Transparency Initiative which provides a standard machine-readable format for donors to publish. Already more than twenty donors have signed up to IATI including the UK, European Commission, Germany, the World Bank, and the UNDP. You can encourage more donors to publish to IATI by signing the Make Aid Transparent petition — already nearly 2000 people and over 70 organisations have signed.