Malawi

In response to the demand for increased transparency and improved geographic funding information, the Ministry of Finance of Malawi has partnered with AidData, Development Gateway, and the Robert S. Strauss Center’s Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program at the University of Texas, in collaboration with the World Bank Institute, to better identify aid efforts aimed at reducing poverty, addressing climate change, improving infrastructure, health, or education, and increasing government capacity.

The Ministry of Finance of Malawi is leading the efforts to geocode the aid activities of more than 30 donors within the Malawi Aid Management Platform. Mapping this information empowers stakeholders by enabling them to better understand the allocation of development assistance. For aid donors, this means the ability to better coordinate and harmonize aid efforts. This not only increases the potential effectiveness of efforts, but also allows donors to cut down on duplicate efforts, and direct aid to underserved areas instead.

By providing geocoded project data combined with sub-national indicators of need, the partnership is demonstrating the viability of the concept of multi-donor mapping, with true country ownership. The geocoded dataset will be made public and will be used by the Malawi Ministry of Finance to generate aid reports, catalyze new conversations with its donor partners, and improve aid effectiveness at the local level across the country.

The maps of Malawi shown below begin to demonstrate the types of questions that can be asked using location data from all donors in a partner country. For example, this map shows the distribution of health projects across the country relative to the number injured or ill in the previous 2 weeks, according to the 2008 Census.

One observation from this map of agricultural aid against food as a proportion of total expenses is that the African Development Bank has many activities around Lake Malawi. Further investigation shows that they are part of the $11.5 million “Lake Malawi Artisanal Fisheries Development Project.” Interactive maps make it easier to have a clear picture of the contributions of individual donors toward better development outcomes.

Download the Malawi Geocoding case study ENG | FRA

Open data for international development

AidData increases aid transparency by providing tools, visualizations, services, and data related to development finance. more...

Malawi