WM Project to Track Foreign Aid Gains Support, Wins Interest

By Matt Poms Saturday, June 26, 2010

A growing research project at the College of William and Mary received a big gift Thursday, courtesy of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. AidData, a wide-ranging database tracking the flow of foreign aid launched in March, and is now the recipient of a $1 million grant that will enable it to maintain its operating budget, while adding several new areas of focus.

“This is the most comprehensive database in the world tracking foreign aid flows,” government professor Michael Tierney, who spearheads the project, said. “This grant was vital to sustaining the research project. If Hewlett hadn’t decided to continue supporting us, I think we really would have struggled.”

The Hewlett Foundation was instrumental in the project’s initial creation, donating $1.75 million since 2006 to help get the database up and running. Similar gifts from the Gates Foundation, which gave $2.9 million, and the National Science Foundation had ensured the resources to begin the initiative, but the latest grant was crucial to the project’s continuation.

“Gates saw the initial grant as a catalytic grant, they wanted to make sure we got this project off the ground, whereas I think Hewlett saw it as a long-term relationship,” Tierney said. “Part of their core funding has to do with transparency of financial flows.”

That faith has paid off, as AidData has transformed into a valued source in the field of foreign aid since its release. The project tracks aid projects all over the world, assembling them into one, coherent database, which is accessible to any researchers or other interested parties online (see it by clicking here).http://www.AidData.org William and Mary undergraduate students conduct the bulk of the research, gathering and organizing the data, before encoding it into the database.

Nearing its fourth month of existence, the project has seen its data cited in 156 different blog entries or news articles concerning foreign aid.

“If Germany gives money to Tanzania to build a bridge, that’s the kind of transaction that we are tracking. It’s almost a million records,” Tierney said. “Right now, there are a variety of different efforts to track aid flows, but they are not organized comprehensively under one umbrella. This is one effort to provide a single source for gaining information on aid data.”

AidData was originally created with academic research in mind, while also providing an outlet for undergraduate government majors to gain valuable research experience in the field. But the database’s reach has been greater. In addition to academics, government officials for both donor and recipient countries have utilized AidData, as well as a variety of non-governmental organizations.

The project recently started a collaboration with the World Bank, sending 10 researchers to help encode data to plot aid sites over data on poverty.

“They want to overlay the locations of their projects with information about poverty, to see whether or not their projects to reduce poverty are going to the most impoverished part of a country,” Tierney said.

The new grant will help the project continue to seek out partnerships such as that, while also maintaining its current research. The database would like to add information on private donors, as well as new aid organizations, data that has not been tracked efficiently before.

“We always thought that this would be a great resource for academic research and it would be a great way to train William and Mary students on how to do research,” Tierney said. “We didn’t expect to get involved in policy-relevant issues. We did not expect people from the World Bank to be calling us. So for me, the biggest surprises have been the interest in the non-academic community in using these data.”