Aid Explorer

International development is a complex global goal that faces massive coordination barriers.

The difference in income between rich and poor has expanded over the years from a 4-to-1 factor to 100-to-1. Where there once were only a handful of development agencies, thousands have now emerged.

The system that connects donor agencies, recipient countries and development challenges is extremely complex and should not be managed with a top-down approach.

The Aid Explorer was developed as a tool to facilitate better aid coordination. You can relate any aid organization or development issue with a country and determine whether the agencies with an interest in that particular country also have an interest in the issue. You can also rank organizations in terms of how well they match the priorities of the countries they work with.

There are 3 main components to the Aid Explorer:

Profiles
Understand what issues face countries and which aid organizations are aligned to address these issues.

Network Maps
Understand how issues, countries, and organizations relate to one another.

Rankings
We report our findings and the best alignments of countries, issues and organizations.

We describe how we created our dataset and how to extract useful knowledge from it in the paper "The Structure and Dynamics of International Development Assistance," published on February 2013 in the Journal of Globalization and Development.