Where is aid data made available?

There are lots of different ways in which aid data is made available; some, through online portals which allow you to view rather than download the data, and others as raw data, as mentioned above. Through the Tools section on the site, we aim to make it as easy as possible for you to find what you need.

Here are some of the most most useful places where you can find different bits of aid data and information.

• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) makes their data available in two ways:

Firstly, through the Development Assistance Committee’s (DAC’s) annual aggregate database, which provides comprehensive data on the volume, origin and types of aid and other resource flows. The Development Assistance Committee is made up of 29 major aid donor countries.

Secondly, through its Creditor Reporting System, (CRS) which provides detailed information on individual aid activities, such as sectors, countries, project descriptions etc.

Both of these sources are available through their Query Wizard for International Development Statistics (QWIDS) tool, where you can find data reported from all of the 29 DAC member countries to the OECD, with regards to their activities as classified to be ‘Official Development Assistance’.

• International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) registry: for the organisations and governments who have chosen to publish to IATI, you can access all IATI data in raw, XML format here. The organisations can (and do) publish IATI data themselves on their own websites.

There are lots of data portals which use IATI data, if you’d rather browse through it via a more friendly user interface- we’ll go through those later.

(More information on IATI data])

• Donor specific data portals – donors, like rich governments or multilateral agencies, increasingly make their information available through data portals. Sometimes, these data portals allow users to download the relevant raw data, but often, they simply present visualisations or chosen ‘headlines’ of information. We’ll go through a few of these later on, too.
• Aid Information Systems, also known as Aid Management Platforms: these are country-based platforms, designed to help manage aid activities in countries. It is where donors can report their activities to aid-recipient countries, which helps a variety of people, like government officials, or donors themselves, track, coordinate and monitor aid activities into their country. Countries have tended to go down one of three routes: designing bespoke systems, or using a system from Development Gateway, or Synergy International.