There were two updates to the U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard last week: obligation and expenditure data for USAID and MCC for FY 2013.

While we continue to applaud the agencies making these crucial first steps in increasing the aid transparency, the quality of this information continues to be a concern. It is high level information which would be difficult to use in country as it wouldn’t give much context or detail to activities on the ground.

The granularity of the information is also an issue. Unfortunately, this is not yet project level data which is what is most useful to understand the spending patterns of donors. It is good to have data by country and sectors but the real value is in the project level data. Important fields such as descriptions, project titles, activity budget, budget documents and objectives are still missing.

In addition:

Treasury published

• planned data for 2011, 2012 and 2013
• obligated data for 2010, 2011 and 2012
• spent data for 2010, 2011 and 2012

DOD published

• planned data for 2011 and 2012
• obligated data for 2011 and 2012
• spent data for 2011 and 2012

Treasury and DOD’s publication of “current data” (from the past 13 months) includes the following information elements:

• Actual dates
• Current Status
• Unique ID- these are not IATI IDs so it is not possible to link to other activities
• Sector
• Actual expenditure
• Planned expenditure (for both agencies these are commitments)

**Organization level information elements are not yet published**

All this information can be found in IATI as the Registry pulls the information from the same file on the Dashboard.