After all the blogging we’ve done on how hard it is to find complete and accurate information (as opposed to “success stories”) on USAID’s website, I think we’d be remiss not to mention a new US government site launched just before the holidays.
The Foreign Assistance Dashboard is the first version of a site that will someday allow users to create charts and tables showing where and how well US aid funds have been spent.
On the plus side, it looks good, makes pretty charts, and it’s easy to use. In future iterations, US officials have said that it will publish data in an internationally comparable format. (This is important so that recipient countries, which receive aid from so many different donors, can get a full picture of aid inflows.)
The page on Pakistan tells us, for example, that $3 billion has been requested from Congress for Pakistan in 2011; $1.6 billion of that is for “Peace and Security,” and most of that is specifically for “Stabilization Operations and Security Sector Reform.”
On the minus side, it’s missing most of the information that actually matters to anyone tracking where the money goes and measuring its impact. The country information pages are incomplete because they exclude funds allocated to regional offices rather than country offices. And, as you can see from the below chart, the site has only data from USAID and State, and only shows appropriated amounts, not what has actually been spent.
While I admire the guts it took to publish such an aspirational matrix, I fear the day may still be far away when we will see a nice row of Xs in that last performance data column. Still, a recent editorial from transparency guru Owen Barder reminds why that is a goal worth pushing for:
The shift to a global information standard for aid sounds a rather dull and technocratic change, but a common standard for sharing information unlocks a world of possibility. It will enable the information from multiple aid agencies to be easily used by governments, parliaments and citizens in donor and developing nations.
It democratises aid, removing the monopoly of information and power from governments and aid professionals. It inspires innovation and informs learning. It reduces bureaucracy. It also makes it possible for communities to collaborate, for citizens to hold governments to account and for the beneficiaries of aid to speak for themselves.
9 Comments
Maybe, I have become overly cynical but I cannot share the optimism of people like Owen Barder about this kind of things: for me, under the pretense of “transparency”, this type of site throws data at you (however, it may be gathered, under what definition, how organized etc…) but, in general, it ends up being self-serving and falling far short of providing information on too many aspects. In many ways in reminds me of these late night TV commercials for home products (“it chops, it dices, it purées in a few moves … and easy to clean!”) that, once received, fall far short of the expectations they created.
Can you please correct the spelling of “congress” in the third paragraph? I can’t share this with others if there are spelling errors.
Thanks- like the post and want to share!
@Quicksilversurfer makes a very good point. Are we exaggerating the claims?
Aid agencies have sometimes fallen into the trap of offering visibility (telling stories of how aid is used) instead of transparency (allowing outsiders to delve into the raw information themselves). But the current direction – embodied in the International Aid Transparency Initiative – is towards making the raw data available, so we won’t only get “self serving” and partial information.
As for “throwing data at you”, the proposed international standards will make it manageable for individuals and organisations to collect, aggregate and compare information across many different aid agencies. The raw data itself won’t be much use to anyone, but having the data published according to international standards will lower the barriers so that it becomes practical to write many different applications or websites that use the information in a way that is meaningful to specific audiences.
The information about aid will be of most value when it is put in the context of other information (e.g. budget allocations, or poverty data). Many people will not be primarily interested in data about aid alone, but will include aid information in other, wider applications (e.g. in deciding resource use for a community). So donor agencies should not themselves try to meet the diverse needs of different audiences: there are too many possible uses of the information. It should be easily and ubiquitously available for other people to use in specific contexts (rather as weather information is today). Donors should concentrate instead on making this information available and accessible for other people to use in this way.
As I said in my article, aid transparency won’t, by itself, make aid more effective. But it is difficult to imagine how aid can become more effective without greater transparency. In other words, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for better aid. Aid information will, over time, become a utility. A food processor doesn’t make you a better cook, whatever the advertisements say, but most cooks would rather have one than do the job manually.
Kind regards
Owen
I support Owen and Laura on this one: an analysis of what should be done in aid is only possible if we know what is being done. This information exchange is nowadays impartial and happening with lots of delays. If information would be shared the moment it is relevant, a world of possibilities for focusing on the gaps and needs becomes available.
Imagine also the possibilities for evaluation if all data would be public. Comparing the efficiency of actors would become possible.
This is why I would support to go even further: not only have a common standard for information sharing, but also a common standard for information gathering, aka use standard forms for all benchmark events in the project cycle.
Mike, Fixed the typo, thanks. Laura
Quicksilversurfer,
It’s too bad that a lot of what passes for “transparency” is actually just what Owen here is calling “visibility,” or carefully edited and incomplete information about how aid is spent. So it’s important to gauge which is which, to separate the self-serving hype and the toothless commitments from real steps towards timely, complete, comparable disclosure of data. And I think there have been a few advances in the latter category in recent years.
And Owen is right on about transparency being necessary but not sufficient for better aid.
Laura
“The country information pages are incomplete because they exclude funds allocated to regional offices rather than country offices.”
They provide regional data separately, here:
http://foreignassistance.gov/regionintro.aspx
I guess it would be nice, though, if the country profiles included money from the regional offices. That is sort of misleading.
One hopes that by putting the data into more easily narrative visual formats it starts creating a deeper interest in the data itself.
The danger is factoids masquerading as actionable or useful information. The opportunity is more probing questions and a desire to learn more about the nature & integrity of the data beneath the presentation layer.
“transparancy guru” !
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