How is aid data made available?

• As high-level aggregated figures: eg. the amount of money going to/from certain countries per year, or from certain institutions. This can be useful to see global trends; for example, to see how aid flows to a certain region or country have changed over time, or how global political events have affected the split of aid data.

• At project level: eg. how much has been spent on a certain project, over a certain amount of time. This can be good to see, for example, at what stage a project is, how long it lasted, and how much was spent on certain projects. Often in the country or donor portals, the project entries include longer documents (for example, the Call to Tender), details of the companies/organisations that were also involved on the project), and sometimes assessments of how the project went. They can be useful to get an idea of what donors are doing in certain areas.

Project level information can also be useful to see in other ways; below is a map of Bangladesh, showing just projects from the World Bank. It really hits home how many there are, when you can see all of them at once (especially when you bear in mind that this is just from one donor).

Sometimes, you also have the option to change the ‘base map’ to show, for example, maternal health, or literacy rates. It can be interesting to compare whether these development indicators actually correlate in any way to the projects that are taking place in those areas. For example — are projects addressing education actually taking place in areas with low literacy rates?

• At a granular, more detailed level. This raw data (for example, in CSV files) is important if you want to mix it up with other data sets and find the story that way, or compare it to other indicators, or do things that aren’t featured in the data portals in which it might already appear (certain types of visualisations, for example). If you have raw data, you can properly explore it, and try out some of the tools we’ll go into later.

There’s lots of detail in the picture above which might not make that much sense, yet! But don’t worry – it’s just as an example to show what kind of data you can get.