Case study 1: Why Is Afghanistan Sending Aid to Gaza?

Let’s start with this story: Afghanistan – a low-income country which receives Official Development Assistance from other, richer countries – is, apparently, sending aid to Gaza.

The way the headline is structured sounds almost indignant – by asking the question, we’re starting at the point of thinking that, in fact, Afghanistan shouldn’t be sending any aid. The story explains as much to begin with, and goes on to give some precise figures:

According to World Bank estimates, Afghanistan received more than $6.7 billion in foreign aid in 2012, the bulk of which came from the US.
Happily, there are links next to both of those claims – let’s follow them.

The first (following the link from ‘aid’ in the quote above) takes us to the World Bank’s databank:

And marked with the arrow, is the figure that is being quoted – that Afghanistan received over $6.7 billion in ODA in 2012. It’s great that the journalist here has actually linked to the data source, as this makes it much easier to verify the figure!

So, let’s move on to the next link in that sentence, which quotes where the ‘bulk’ of the aid comes from – this takes us directly to this image:

The table ‘Top Ten Donors of gross ODA’ seems to indicate that the US was by far the biggest donor to Afghanistan – although, presenting the information as an image is possibly the least useful way that it could be presented, as it is not machine readable and impossible to get the data in a structured way! In case we wanted to follow the trail further, the source of the data is however stated, as
www.oecd.org/dac/stats – this time though, we’ll leave it there.

We’ve now traced the source of the two main statistics stated – as you can see, it’s made quite simple if the writer links to where they got their information from. Unfortunately, however, that’s not always the case…