Open data Archives

Who should publish aid data, and why?

By Alex Tilley | Apr 15, 2024 | Blog

Ideally, all aid organisations would publish detailed information about their programmes, spending and impact, allowing us full visibility of the aid delivery network. But there are hundreds of thousands of aid organisations around the world, and only 230 agencies (albeit the biggest ones) regularly publish data in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. So, with such a mountain to climb, and limited resources, where should the IATI community focus its efforts? Alex Tilley looks at who is currently publishing IATI data and considers the pros and cons of supporting all those organisations funding and implementing aid projects to publish data, versus just the largest.

How is open aid data being used?

By Elma Jenkins | Apr 4, 2024 | Blog

More organisations are now publishing more aid and development data, with richer detail than ever before. And more tools are being produced to enable a broader group of people with different interests to access the data. All this effort is not in vain. Elma Jenkins has been digging into the detail of exactly how open aid data is now being used and highlights some of the creative ways it is supporting research, policy and development practice.

Exploring IATI data wells with publisher owned portals

By Elma Jenkins and Guest | Sep 6, 2023 | Blog

The second blog in our series exploring aid data tools discusses portals produced by countries or institutions to provide access to their aid and development data. Elma Jenkins and Rolf Kleef review the differing levels of complexity – from high-level overviews to detailed data from multiple organisations and multiple data sources. They consider what features make for an accessible data portal, and provide a comprehensive list of the portals currently available.

Your step by step guide to researching funding for women’s economic empowerment and women’s financial inclusion

By Alex Farley and Sally Paxton | Nov 2, 2022 | Blog, News

We’ve produced two new guides for anyone wishing to track international funding for women’s economic empowerment (WEE) or women’s financial inclusion (WFI) in their own country. The guides are based on an approach we’ve developed and tested over the last two years, which is designed so that it can be used and adapted by decision makers, researchers and advocates for their own purposes – including holding funders accountable or advocating for different investments. The new step by step guides are concise, accessible and flexible – signposting to a range of other, more detailed resources.

Mapping empowerment – using giant datasets to track investments in women’s economic empowerment

By Alex Farley | Jun 8, 2022 | Blog

In the run up to the launch of the 2022 Aid Transparency Index, Alex Farley-Kiwanuka explains the monumental effort undertaken by her team to combine four global datasets in order to track Women’s Economic Empowerment funding across three countries. Alex also shares why she feels the Aid Transparency Index is so important for maintaining and improving international funding data and making it useable for researchers like herself.

The vital role transparency plays in accountability of nutrition financing

By Guest | May 23, 2022 | Case studies

Richard Watts of Save the Children discusses how open data is being used to track aid to nutrition and hold donors accountable for their commitments. He explains that this is only possible due to continued improvements in the available aid data, but development partners could still do more to increase their transparency.