At its annual meetings in Lisbon, Portugal (June 9-10), the African Development Bank and AidData announced the launch of an interactive map of AfDB project activities in Cameroon, Morocco, and Tanzania. As part of the launch, the underlying data sets for these countries were also made public, demonstrating the AfDB’s commitment to transparency as an IATI signatory.
Today, the geocoded locations of all AfDB projects continent-wide approved from 2009-2010 are being made available at AidData.org. The data include more than $10 billion in AfDB Group funding to 43 African countries. In total, AidData’s researchers, in partnership with AfDB project managers, were able to identify nearly 2,000 sub-national locations from the 183 AfDB projects. Using these data, stakeholders can view the precise locations of schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, and other bank-financed activities.
The geocoded data is also fully compatible with the IATI geocoding standard and World Bank/AidData Mapping for Results data, also available from AidData and maps.worldbank.org so researchers and analysts can mash the data up to examine donor coordination, sub-national aid targeting, and many other questions. It is exciting to see donors begin mapping their data to provide a clearer picture of the distribution of aid resources within countries, ultimately improving the impact of aid on the ground.