AidData Lets You See Who's Giving What, Where

If you haven't yet seen it, do yourself a favor and saunter over to the new AidData.org portal, which just launched this week. It's still in beta mode, but already, it's offering more information about donors' dollars around the world than was previously available in one place before.

Ever wondered where all of Saudi Arabia's oil-slicked aid donations go? Over on Aidwatch, a simple chart built using AidData.org can tell you. (Mostly to Algeria, then Yemen, then Morocco. China ranks fourth on that list.) Plugging in "Saudi Arabia" as a query into AidData's system, it's easy to pull a list of all the projects the country covers. For example: in 1979, the country financed a road in Cameroon for $3.6 million. If I click, the system pulls up more details: the village the road connects to, and figures on a related loan. Neat, right?

In fact, AidData's information actually goes back quite a bit farther than even 1979. The system tracks projects financed between 1945 and 2009 -- nearly one million of them altogether -- a period spanning some $4 trillion in records. It's not exhaustive, of course. So far, though, the system covers data from 87 different datas, and more are on the way. And the system makes it much easier to get information on under-reported donors, including countries like Latvia, Chile and Kuwait.

But beyond its immediate "ooh, neat" properties, what's the project's real impact?

According to the blog post that accompanied the system's launch, its creators believe that aid transparency can "help lift more people out of poverty and, more importantly, save lives." For example, they cite the fact that in 1995, one study found that only 20% of certain funds for primary education were actually being delivered to their targets. But by 2001, once officials made where the money was expected to go public, that figure jumped to 80%.

Likewise, another 2009 study found that in Uganda, greater levels of transparency (in the form of "report cards" for clinics) dramatically helped improve outcomes. Waiting time decreased, absenteeism among clinic staff dropped, fewer drugs disappeared and health services even enjoyed broader utilization. In other words, compelling stuff.

There are plenty of questions this sort of data can answer, and lots of potential for the creation of new apps that can build on it. As Michael Tierney (who directs AidData) tells IRIN, "We want a continual feedback loop: if the database says a donor funded a bridge in Nicaragua and someone sends in a picture of a half-built bridge in Nicaragua, we need to connect those dots.” At some point, it'd be amazing to see a search capability that would get linked with a user's location, so that someone searching could find any projects, say, in a 300-mile radius.

The system's still rife with acronyms and field-specific jargon (I'm glad to see they'll be improving their keyword search in the coming weeks), and there's definitely room to evolve. But it's an incredible project to see get off the ground, and already one that's far outpacing other data providers out there. Go ahead and give it a test drive -- and send any ideas and feedback to info@aiddata.org.

Photo Credit: tambako the jaguar