Alena Stern

Senior Program Manager

Alena worked as a Program Manager and Senior Program Manager from 2013-2017.

Summary

Alena Stern managed AidData's USAID Higher Educations Solution Network (HESN) award from 2013-2017, as Program Manager and Senior Program Manager. The ACDP is a partnership between AidData at the College of William and Mary, Development Gateway, the University of Texas-Austin, Brigham Young University, and Esri.

Education

Background

September 7, 2017

Building a geospatial revolution

Geocoding the globe! In our five years of partnership with USAID, we located over 130,000 development activities and $750 billion in assistance.

August 31, 2017

Expanding USAID's capacity for data-driven decisions

AidData Summer Fellows afford USAID Missions the opportunity to establish a basis for sustained geospatial work to enhance their development programs.

August 22, 2017

Allocating funding fairly in Nepal

Geocoded data has empowered government officials to more effectively negotiate with donors and advance Nepal’s development interests.

August 1, 2017

Making development data fit for purpose in Senegal

By calling attention to barriers to the use of development data and making actionable recommendations, an AidData report helped renew investment in Senegal's aid management platform.

April 6, 2017

Data for development: Measuring only what we use

Every dollar spent on data is a dollar not spent on life-saving vaccines or key environmental protections — so we should not collect data that we will not use.

July 8, 2015

AidData funds next generation of development research using geospatial data

In this post we’re excited to tell you more about 9 awardees that will begin work this summer, and provide a preview of how this cohort of research projects will advance our mission to make development finance data more accessible and actionable.

February 20, 2014

Making Data Matter: How Aid Management Platforms are Changing Development In-Country

Launching public portals invites a wide group of stakeholders – donors, universities, think tanks, and advocacy groups – to work alongside the government in order to use aid information to improve development outcomes.

November 14, 2013

Impact Beyond the Numbers: Reflections on Year One of the AidData Center

With one year of implementation behind us, the AidData Center has created a strong foundation that will enable us to bring our big idea to scale in the coming years.

April 10, 2013

Geocoding and public aid data in Nepal

To ensure that development stakeholders in Nepal are eager and able to use the public AMP data, the AidData team worked to build a strong network of local partners in Nepal.

February 13, 2013

The Winding Road to the AidData Center for Development Policy

The AidData partnership was created with a clear mission: to capture the entire universe of aid at the project-level in a single database.

June 27, 2011

Experimenting with Aid Information

AidData will be partnering with UNICEF and Ushahidi to run a randomized controlled trial in Uganda to test which incentive mechanisms are most effective in recruiting Ugandan citizens to provide useful information on development needs and outcomes.

August 17, 2010

Donor Coordination in Kenya and Mozambique

Geo-referencing development projects is one very promising method that could facilitate greater coordination and dialogue between policymakers, development practitioners, researchers, NGOs, recipient governments, and citizens.

August 8, 2010

Mapping For Results

Geo-referencing creates the localized information that empowers recipients to hold their governments accountable and makes it possible to easily visualize aid information so it is accessible and understandable.

Policy Report

Decoding Data Use: How do leaders source data and use it to accelerate development?

Takaaki Masaki, Samantha Custer, Agustina Eskenazi, Alena Stern, Rebecca Latourell

2017-11-28

Policy Report

Avoiding Data Graveyards: Insights from Data Producers & Users in Three Countries

Samantha Custer and Tanya Sethi, Eds.

2017-04-01

Journal Article

In-And-Outers and Moonlighters: An Evaluation of the Impact of Policy-making Exposure on IR Scholarship

International Studies Perspectives

Bradley C. Parks, Alena Stern

2013-04-15