Increasing the Usability and Uptake of Open Foreign Assistance Data

[philipashlock]

[submitted through Federal interagency process]

Topline Description

Increase the use and uptake of open foreign assistance data

Key Objective(s)

Increased foreign assistance transparency has the power to promote effective development by helping recipient governments manage their aid flows and by empowering citizens to hold governments accountable for how foreign assistance is spent in their country. Over the past few years, more foreign assistance data has been available than ever before with over 500 publishers to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard, however, awareness and use of the data is still relatively low.

In order to support data driven decision-making in development, potential users need to be made aware of this data. When provided with open foreign assistance data a variety of stakeholders express interest and potential uses, but to truly increase uptake the US needs to understand if the current formats and functions are what is needed to be truly useful.

Through this commitment the US will invite greater participation and openness with overseas government counterparts as well as with overseas civil society groups. This commitment will invite increased participation, as in order to make the data more useful, the US will need to understand the current limitations and implement change where possible. This leads to collaboration for achieving a common goal which is data-driven decision-making.

Paragraph Description

• Increase the awareness of and the capacity for using open foreign assistance information with stakeholders both domestically and overseas through engagement on current needs and gaps.
• Collaborate with civil society and host country governments to identify uses for open foreign assistance data including local reporting requirements, and support identified implementation tasks.

Measurable Metrics

Data used by Missions in their in-country reporting and operations. Data produced in IATI format used to populate host-country government reporting requirements.

[JamesCoe]

Publish What You Fund supports this commitment. Below are a list of some steps we believe the US should commit to, if it wants to increase the usability and uptake of foreign assistance data.

Data quality remains a barrier for users of US data published using the International Aid Transparency Initiative Standard. We believe the following, practical, steps can be taken to help remedy the situation:

• By December 2017, civil society should be fully briefed on the progress / timeline of USAID’s Development Information Solution. This piece of data infrastructure is critical to USAID’s ability to centralize, and therefore publish, high quality foreign assistance data.

• The government must embrace a “data-driven culture”. To achieve this, by May 2018, there should be an intra-agency working group set up to improve the rates of use of all foreign assistance open data, including the US’, within aid disbursing agencies. This working group should regularly engage with civil society.

• By December 2018, the US should have fully reconciled the “duelling dashboards” and publish one high quality data set for all stakeholder use. At present both USAID (Aid Explorer) and the Department of State (FA.gov) run dashboards, which claim to report similar data but contain significant discrepancies between them.

• The US Government should reaffirm its commitment in the Grand Bargain -- to publish timely and high quality data on humanitarian funding by May 2018 – by including it in the Open Government Partnership commitments.