Blog Archives

Mapping empowerment – using giant datasets to track investments in women’s economic empowerment

By Alex Farley- Kiwanuka | Jun 8, 2022 | Blog

In the run up to the launch of the 2022 Aid Transparency Index, Alex Farley-Kiwanuka explains the monumental effort undertaken by her team to combine four global datasets in order to track Women’s Economic Empowerment funding across three countries. Alex also shares why she feels the Aid Transparency Index is so important for maintaining and improving international funding data and making it useable for researchers like herself.

Which organisations will feature in our new DFI Transparency Index?

By Farzana Ahmed | May 26, 2022 | Blog, News

We have just commenced work on a new DFI Transparency Index, which will assess the transparency of some of the world’s leading bilateral and multilateral Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). This blog sets out the timeline and process, how this index differs from the Aid Transparency Index, and which DFIs we’ll be assessing and ranking.

Following the money: using data to track development spending in Nigeria

By Guest | May 24, 2022 | Blog

In the run up to the launch of the 2022 Aid Transparency Index, Hamzat Lawal discusses how Connected Development works with marginalised communities to track funding and monitor development projects. He reflects on whether international donors, and those inputting the aid data, know that teams of community volunteers are consuming and using the same data to ensure their projects are being implemented effectively.

How to track aid flows to local organisations

By Gary Forster | May 19, 2022 | Blog

Many donors have adopted targets to direct more funding to local organisations. But past efforts to track funding flows have often struggled to agree on a definition of local. In this blog we present an approach we’ve been testing for six months. Using USAID as an example, we’ve been working to understand, interpret and present existing data in a way that enables stakeholders to undertake analysis and track funding based on their own definitions of local.

Why do DFIs invest in financial intermediaries and why do we need to know more?

By Farzana Ahmed | Apr 27, 2022 | Blog

This blog discusses the DFI Transparency Tool’s fifth component – financial intermediaries. Farzana Ahmed outlines why financial intermediaries are a significant aspect of DFI investments. She considers the importance of transparency of financial intermediary investments in order to understand their impact and allow community accountability efforts.

Meet our independent reviewers

By Elma Jenkins | Mar 31, 2022 | Blog

As we await the final results of the 2022 Aid Transparency Index, Elma Jenkins has been speaking to some of our most crucial but least known researchers, the independent reviewers. The 2022 Index process has so far involved three months reviewing several thousand documents, extraordinary amounts of International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data, 50 publishers and 36 independent reviewers. The reviewer role is crucial in ensuring we make a full and fair assessment of publishers’ data.