Welcome to the world of aid data! In this first module, we’ll be starting from first principles: what do we actually mean when we say ‘aid’, and why is looking at aid data important?

One major source of aid data is made available through the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). There are a few different ways that you can access raw IATI data, so here’s a quick run through of what you can get, and where it is, including IATI data itself as well as data about IATI data (metadata).

So once you've got the raw IATI data, what next? Often it might need 'cleaning' - here, we'll use a sample IATI dataset to learn how to use a powerful cleaning tool, OpenRefine.

We've seen a few ways of where to find aid data, how to clean it and use it - but how is this applied in the real world? Here are a couple of examples of 'reverse engineering' aid data that we might come across in the media - maybe it will give you some ideas!

This module is intended as a reference point while you're going through the other modules. In each case, the relevance of the term to working specifically with data is highlighted to try and make it clear what you should be looking out for when you come across the term in your work.