We congratulate the Center for Global Development for their latest effort on tracking foreign assistance through the U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard Tracker. The tracker will help inform a number of stakeholders on the progress of the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, including what agencies are uploading information (planning, obligation, spent, and implementation), when, and with what frequency.

The next step is to see how useful and granular this information is – so, what does it allow the user to do, see, or visualize?

The Dashboard is an important domestic resource, but it does not provide internationally comparable data. High quality and comparable data is important because it allows for many different uses – from helping partners in the field plan their domestic budget, to informing members of Congress on agencies’ spending against other donors.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) captures comparable information from all donors in one place and in one format. Only when all aid data is published to IATI will the U.S. have fully transparent foreign assistance.

See our Aid Transparency Tracker to understand how we are monitoring the progress of all donors in making their aid transparent.