The calls for more effective use of foreign aid resources continue to grow louder and in response to this the AidData team (a coalition of The PLAID team at the College of William and Mary, Brigham Young University and Development Gateway) is getting ready to launch AidData.org, the first ever online database of information on development and aid activities. Currently, the Aid Database has information on more than 850,000 development activities financed by approximately 70 countries and multilateral institutions from 1946 to 2009, and information on $1.8 trillion in development assistance has been added to the existing sum of $2.3 trillion in the database. AidData has been based on the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System (CRS) but will also provide information on donors that do not fit the OECD definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and are not captured by OECD’s CRS.
AidData will be formally launched at the Aid Transparency and Development Finance Conference hosted at University College in Oxford, UK on 22-25 March 2010. The database will go a long way in helping governments, donors, CSOs and the public see the bigger picture of aid with the expectation that this will help build a greater understanding of what makes aid effective.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), working closely with AidData, also seeks to increase the transparency of aid resources and is bringing together donors, developing country governments, CSOs and others who use aid information to agree common information standards, which will be applied to how aid is reported. GuideStar International is a member of IATI’s Technical Advisory Group and is advocating the need for good quality, publicly available information on CSOs to aid development effectiveness.
