DEVCO workshop on open aid data

In development and humanitarian contexts, access to accurate and timely information is crucial for distributing aid and reporting on its results. But with the wealth of data available from donors and implementing partners, comparing the different sets can be a daunting challenge.

This is where the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) comes in. Launched in 2008, it’s an open data standard for publishing information on development cooperation. The European Commission (EC) has been publishing its foreign aid data to IATI since 2011.

To help its staff make the most use of the standard in their everyday work, the EC has created a workshop that introduces open aid data and how it can be used – in reports, to support joint programming, for donor mapping exercises, partner country dialogue, and more.

“The three-hour workshop aims for interactivity and hands-on experience,” said instructor Steven Flower, from the Open Data Services. “I encourage the participants to select a country or region that is of interest to them, and show them how they can extract and visualise the relevant data sets using online tools. The point is to help them make practical use of the data in their work.”

The workshop is aimed at staff working in Delegations and Headquarters, especially those responsible for inputting data into EC systems, as well as staff working with donor coordination and Joint Programming and staff providing data for partner country use. Contact Ms. Katarina TAFVELIN Katarina.TAFVELIN@ec.europa.eu for more information.

This article was written by Bartosz Brzezinski, the Editorial Coordinator at Capacity4dev