Rural development project data

Description

Data describing rural development projects, funded by a government. The funding may be from local government or a donor government (aid). The rural development projects aim to support agriculture, economic development and the environment in isolated, sparsely populated areas. This category is dealing with project level data, financial data, but also monitoring and evaluation, project activities. etc.

Key datasets

• General project information, including financial data, location, beneficiaries, activities
• Project output, outcome and impact
• Project baseline and survey data
• Project documents

Rationale

The availability of open data on government-funded rural development can provide more transparency in government spending, and better opportunities to collaborate and balance between different programmes and projects, making these projects more effective in reaching their goals.

Expected impact: High

Farmer use

• Farmers can provide feedback to the government on the implementation of projects and the money spent.

Use by other actors

• Governments and other donors can better coordinate (international) resources and take other projects into account as they develop their own budgets, making rural development more effective.
• Organisations carrying out development projects can use the data to design complementary projects, to find collaborating partners, and to learn from best practices, making rural development more effective.
• Private sector organisations, including the financial sector, can use the rural development data to better align their investments with government funding, avoiding duplication.
• Detailed information coming from baseline and project evaluation results can be used as input for agricultural research.
• Civil society can use the data to monitor project implementation and spending, supporting the effective use of resources.

Readiness

A distinction needs to be made between internationally funded rural development programmes (AID programmes) and domestic rural development programmes.

Most donors now publish their international assistance data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Several donors also require their implementing partners to publish to IATI as well. The next implementation step is to improve the quality of the data provided, the tools to access the data, and the actual third-party use of the data.

In contrast, domestic agriculture projects are now generally reported at budget level, and not including very granular data. Having data about domestic projects in IATI format would complement the growing database on rural development, facilitating the coordination between all of these projects.

Examples of implementation

• https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/ Interactive website to explore and visualize the IATI data of all UKAID sponsored projects.
• http://www.openforchange.info/content/7-ways-use-iati-data Open for change describes seven ways to reuse IATI data.
• http://www.d-portal.org/ Generates interactive graphs on the global IATI database.
• https://foodsecurity.ngoaidmap.org/ Provides a global overview of all food-security projects that agreed to join the project.

Initiatives that support interoperability

• To monitor AID projects and spending the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard is becoming common practice: http://iatistandard.org/
• A Guide to IATI data: http://schoolofdata.org/courses/a-guide-to-iati-data/
• The Initiative for the IATI agricultural workgroup and the Initiative for Open AgFunding is working on is working on better use and further development of the IATI Standard. https://www.interaction.org/project/open-ag-funding/overview