As we heard last month during the MDG Summit at the United Nations, progress has been made but much work remains if we are to come close to halving poverty or reaching other targets we all agreed to in 2000. These issues are very much at the center of the Bank-IMF Annual Meetings this week in Washington.
Making development aid more accountable, transparent and effective is at the heart of this week’s discussions. New partnerships and players are emerging. Donor and client governments, along with their constituents, are demanding measurable results. That said, it is challenging to measure aid when there are multiple channels and types of assistance, from bilateral to multilateral, from loans to trust funds, and the data generated is not always presented in a comparable way.
Good information is essential to good decision-making. There is increasing demand for simple and easy access to aid data, showing how much funding is being provided by donor countries, where these funds are going, and how the money is being used. While there is already much information out there, a consolidated picture of aid flows by country is hard to find.
In response, the Bank and the OECD have partnered to create AidFlows, an aid mapping tool showing the flow of funds on a country by country basis. Aidflows shows the total volume of aid coming from OECD members and the total being received by developing countries. Aidflows combines global official development assistance (ODA) information, provided by OECD/DAC, with detailed data for the World Bank Group -- IBRD, IDA, IFC and MIGA -- plus the trust funds that we administer. Aid funding is shown by contributing donor country and by receiving developing country.
The intention is to provide a concise summary of the World Bank’s funding commitments and disbursements in a given developing country. Aidflows focuses on the development resources made available by the World Bank to the poorest countries, in the form of grants and interest-free loans. For each country, there are indicators of aid dependency; data on the type of aid received; the top 10 donors for a country; and information on the sector breakdown of aid, such as how much funding goes to health, education, or infrastructure.
World leaders have set out to increase the flow of development assistance, reduce world poverty, and improve the quality of life for billions of citizens. Donors and beneficiaries should know how much aid donor countries are providing and in what way recipient nations are benefitingWe hope that Aidflows can provide the key facts needed for an informed dialogue about the trends and challenges of development aid.
In launching this tool, we want to make sure it is as consumer friendly and responsive as possible. For that we need your feedback. Please check it out!
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