Making aid information transparent in Kosovo

Kosovo

Although it is the youngest country to have implemented the Aid Management Platform (AMP), Kosovo became a model for aid transparency by making its AMP available to the public online. Vanessa Goas, part of the Development Gateway team working on AMP Kosovo, shares a summary of her time in Pristina:

Since fall 2009, Development Gateway has been working closely with the government and other stakeholders in Kosovo to establish the first comprehensive process and system for tracking aid information in this newly independent country. Before AMP, it was extremely time-consuming for the government to gather, share and analyze information on ongoing aid-funded projects in Kosovo, and for the donors to find out what other donors were doing in a given sector or region. Information was largely unavailable to the general public.

AMP now serves as a one-stop-shop on aid information for all these stakeholders—so for all involved, the public launch was an exciting event. To support the launch, and to continue other activities that are part of the broader capacity building program around aid management, a four-member Development Gateway team spent a week in Kosovo in October. Since projects are entered directly into AMP by donor agencies, we held a data validation workshop, together with the government, to help donors ensure that their data are accurate, timely and complete, as well as refresher donor data entry sessions and government administrative training sessions.

We worked closely with the MEI on production of their first official aid report using AMP, which was an important milestone. Official aid reports are key AMP outputs that demonstrate the value of building sound information management processes—it takes some time, but ultimately the success of a system implementation like this depends on institutional commitment and a sustainable methodology for maintaining and updating data. In the coming months, MEI will also publish quarterly reports using AMP.

On Oct. 11, officials from the MEI and the European Commission Liaison Office to Kosovo (which provides funding for the Aid Management Program in Kosovo) launched AMP officially to a crowd that included a number of government line ministries and many of the 20+ donor agencies in Kosovo. Some members of the local press also attended and seemed interested in the potential of AMP as a tool for increased transparency and coordination of investment activities. As of today, more than $1 billion in donor commitments from over 20 different agencies is registered in the system, and can be viewed in different reports, documents, maps, and dashboards.