Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Blog

Posts Tagged: Foreign Assistance Dashboard

U.S. Signs IATI, but the Proof Is in the Publishing

December 7, 2011

Posted by Will McKitterick in Aid Effectiveness, Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Tags: Busan, Foreign Assistance Dashboard, HLF4

With the development community back from Busan, it’s time to break down what went right and wrong at last week’s meetings. The consensus seems to be that the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in Busan was a mixed bag – some promises, few commitments, little progress (see here for a good breakdown of the meetings from Nancy Birdsall). Donors were able to dodge most measureable, time-bound commitments and left the public with few benchmarks against which to hold them accountable.

Disappointments aside, some achievements did emerge from the grandstanding, particularly with regards to transparency where the U.S. took a major step towards making its aid investments more transparent, measureable, and accessible. During her keynote address at the opening session, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. will join the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI is a voluntary multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at committing donors to publish up-to-date foreign assistance data in a standard format that is accessible and comparable, in line with the Accra Agenda for Action commitments on transparency.

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U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard: Show Me the Data!

November 22, 2011

Posted by Will McKitterick in Aid Effectiveness, Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Tags: Aid Effectiveness, Foreign Assistance Dashboard, Transparency

Yesterday, I was happy to see the MCC finally publish aid data to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, the government’s one-stop-shop for foreign assistance budget and appropriations information. But upon further examination of the website, I couldn’t help but feel a little cheated when I noticed the dearth of new data available in the tool. Nearly a year has passed since the Dashboard was launched in December 2010, and the U.S. government has yet to come up with the majority of its promised haul of agency data.

Rolled out a day after the QDDR, Dashboard was a response to calls for greater transparency and accountability in government and development agencies. It aims to incorporate all U.S. government foreign assistance budget planning, financial program, and performance data in an easily accessible web format, allowing users to track, analyze, and monitor aid investments overtime. The website’s user-friendly graphics allow viewers to peruse through data displayed by country, sector, and year and generate their own tables through manual queries as well as download machine-readable data sets. Inspired by principles embraced in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the Accra Agenda for Action, and President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, the Dashboard was widely heralded as an important step toward establishing a new system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration for monitoring U.S. foreign assistance.

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What Would Google Do? (Donor Cooperation Edition)

November 2, 2011

Posted by Owen Barder in Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance, USAID Tags: Foreign Assistance Dashboard, Transparency, USAID

It is now clear that donor coordination meetings are not the answer to making aid more effective, and donors such as USAID are becoming interested in a more decentralized ‘Google Maps’ approach to aid coordination, facilitating well-informed decisions by people on the ground. For this to work, donors need to publish detailed project level information in an open, reusable, internationally consistent data format. Some donors are not yet showing the necessary resolve.

We now know that the development system has met just one of the 13 targets it set in 2005 for making aid more effective. That is not surprising: the problems diagnosed in the Paris Declaration are real and important, but the solutions that have been pursued in its name have not been practical. There are better ways to achieve the aid effectiveness which the Paris Declaration envisages. Read More…