In the last few weeks the Foreign Assistance Dashboard added two new U.S. agencies to its list of publishers.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) published its aid information on May 28 and the State Department on June 1.

Publish What You Fund welcomes this progress, but initial analysis raises some very basic quality issues.

In summary, the Agriculture Department publication includes obligation and spending data from five of the nine USDA agencies implementing foreign assistance programs. The State Department’s data comes from the State’s centrally-managed financial system and includes both grants and contracts for domestic foreign assistance obligations and expenditures.

Both publications present significant data quality issues. For example, some activities lack a project name or project description. The start and end dates are equally problematic as in many cases they have the start and end date 01/01/0001 [State Department activities can be seen at the bottom of this file].

While Publish What You Fund encourages the publication of more foreign assistance from U.S. agencies, equally concerning is the quality of the data and what challenges it presents to the user of this information.

The Aid Transparency Index (ATI) data collection will close on June 30 and the data analysis will be conducted in July and August. Thorough analysis of this information, along with other U.S. agencies and programs’ data (including the Department of Defense, PEPFAR, MCC, Treasury and USAID) will be published in autumn.

Stay tuned for more developments as we near the launch of the ATI.