Tracking aid and other international development finance in real time

Development Initiatives publishes a range of analysis and evidence on global development finance, including:

• Aid (ODA)
• Data use
• The impacts of Covid-19 on aid.

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Dataset title: Tracking aid and other global development finance in real time

Author: Alex Miller and Jenny Rickard

Source: IATI

Timeframe: January 2018–April 2023

Geography: Global

License: Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license

Citation: Development Initiatives, June 2023. Tracking aid and other international development finance in near real time. Available at: www.devinit.org/data/tracking-aid-international-development-real-time

Acronyms

ODA – Official development assistance

OOF – Other official flows

IATI – International Aid Transparency Initiative

IFI – International financial institution

LDCs – Least developed countries

Glossary of key terms

Aid – In this context, all humanitarian and development assistance, including official development assistance, other official flows and any other development flows reported by official actors to the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

Commitments – Amounts the donor is contracted to disburse.

Disbursements – Actual spend by donor in fulfilment of a contract.

Official development assistance – Defined by the OECD DAC.

Other official flows – Defined by the OECD DAC.

People living in extreme poverty – People living on less than PPP$2.15 a day.

This tracker analyses transactions published to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). A direct download was taken on 30 June 2023 of all the data in the IATI registry. Each transaction was split by recipient and sector classifications to visualise aggregates of poverty targeting and sectoral priorities.

The data tool features a selected group of key bilateral donors, international financial institutions and multilateral institutions reporting to IATI. DI has assessed whether the data provided by these donors for both disbursements and commitments is usable or not.

The full list of donors included in this analysis is in Table A1.

This tracker is by necessity limited to the data that is published to a sufficient standard and in a timely fashion, and is not therefore a comprehensive picture of all donors. Despite this, IATI data has reached a sufficient level of quality and coverage to enable critical analysis of near real-time trends. The data provides a vital early warning system on current aid spending as donors seek to better respond to current and ongoing global challenges, such as those caused by Covid-19.

Some notable exclusions are:

• The UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (who do not provide commitment data for all activities).
• Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (who report total disbursement data for each activity on the latest transaction date).
• France's Agence Française de Développement (who report data on activities cumulatively).

In early February 2023, the Federal Government of the United States split into 18 additional publishers, one for each agency reporting data. It is our understanding that this new data is derived from the same database as they use to report to the CRS, and therefore we have included them since our February 2023 update. We will continue to monitor how the US publishes to evaluate whether its data is of sufficient quality to use in our updates.

In our poverty targeting visualisation, in transitioning from a $1.90 extreme poverty line (2013 PPP) to a $2.15 extreme poverty line (2017 PPP), there were also a number of notable shifts in the poverty data as reported by the World Bank. Some countries that previously had data, such as Afghanistan, no longer do. Additionally, some country poverty estimates have changed substantially.

In our last three updates, we have noticed a deviation in the figures that Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has published to IATI and the CRS for 2021. This deviation may be caused by differences in the ODA accounting of in-kind vaccine donations, but our investigation into the cause is still ongoing.

In the last update, UNICEF's 2022 ODA disbursement figure increased to US$15.75 billion, almost doubling its previously published value of US$8 billion. It was also noticed that total flows targeting sectors do not align with total flows for some donors in the charts above, these differences are caused in some instances by sector level data being unavailable. We are currently looking into resolving this issue.

The World Bank country classifications used for the 'Poverty targeting' tab are due to be updated in July 2023. While we await that release, the categories used for Q1 2023 have been carried forward from 2022.