USAID plans to map all its spending data in some countries

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The U.S. Agency for International Development's new GeoCenter is working on a project to geographically code all agency program sites in selected countries with financial and other data, Administrator Raj Shah said Thursday.

USAID gathered spending data for most of its programs onto a public database in September 2011 as part of the U.S. commitments under the international Open Government Partnership . The GeoCenter project will pull that financial data into an online map and combine it with other international development information.

The department expects other agencies, researchers and entrepreneurs eventually to lay their own geographic data sets over the maps, Shah said, either to better assess the effectiveness of USAID programs or to collect input for their own projects. A geographically coded data set about a country's education levels, for example, could be laid over the map to determine if USAID money is disproportionately benefiting higher education areas.

"I want anyone with an Internet connection and the ability to download Google Maps to be able to . . . identify projects and programs and drill down into them and understand not just what we're doing but also to get a sense of other data that can be spatially overlaid on that context," Shah said.

The administrator was speaking before a Brookings Institution panel discussion on transparency in global development funding. The event was timed around the release of the nonprofit group Publish What You Fund's 2011 Pilot Aid Transparency Index , which found most aid organizations lacking.

USAID and the State Department both placed in the bottom half of 58 measured organizations. The World Bank topped the list, but was still rated only "fair" by Publish What You Fund.

For USAID and many other organizations, the problem isn't simply publishing its data but presenting that data in a way researchers, the public and other development organizations can find and work with.

"The reality is we live in a world where there's a lot of information that's publicly available," Shah said. "Most of our grants are online. I dare you to find them, but most of them are online."

The USAID GeoCenter also will work with agency program sites to use geographic data to advance their development projects.