Stories, ideas, and updates from DGers around the world

In early May, we highlighted the importance of tracking South-South Cooperation (SSC), the exchange of financial and in-kind aid between developing countries. On the United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation, we wanted to highlight some updates about SSC across the Western Hemisphere.Tracking SSC Spending for Information Accuracy

Development Gateway’s dgMarket was one of the first global e-procurement platforms. Since 2003, dgMarket has aggregated tender notices, contract awards and bidding documents from national governments and development agencies. dgMarket now lists over a million opportunities every year from 170 countries, representing around $1 trillion in government procurement.

For years, Big Data – enormous amounts of information from a variety of sources, covering a range of topics – has been recognized as a resource for evaluating the impact and benefit of development projects. Increasingly, implementers, governments, and citizens are working in concert to use this data to shape domestic policy and multilateral programming.But what if we could use Big Data to not only influence national programming and international procedures; what if we harness Big Data to secure physical and material peace and security for all?

I often get asked how AidData takes vast stores of development finance information and translates them into something that can be easily understood by the public. Last week, we published our geocoded data on aid flows to Nepal via the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) registry. Now anyone can easily download the data from our IATI publisher page or aiddata.org to understand who is funding what and where.

We are all familiar with the patterns of supply and demand. For many who are asked to supply open data, the question of demand is a bit more complex than one might initially think. Since the “open”part of open data implies that users shouldn’t need to pay for access to the data, it is harder to gauge what the data are worth to people.

In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, the international community pledged billions of dollars to support Haiti’s reconstruction efforts. The Government of Haiti has made significant strides over the past few years in innovating better methods to ensure this aid is responsive to changing needs and demands on the ground.

As Jed Miller recently noted in The Guardian, making data available online doesn’t mean much on its own. It is a necessary first step in the open data movement, but information is valuable only when it can be used. That means getting the right data in front of the right people.

We're beyond excited to announce that, last night, we officially launched the new (and we're proud to say, improved!) OpenGov Hub. We've all been trickling in and getting settled over the last two months, but we're finally ready to (re)take the open government space by storm.

We’re thrilled to announce the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative has awarded a $1.9 million grant to the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. As a Strauss Center research partner, Development Gateway will support the exploration of complex emergencies in Asia by creating a series of new dashboards to support high-level geospatial analysis and modeling. We hope to learn about the particular dynamics of these emergencies, and how we might build government capacity to respond to and prevent them.

Development Gateway is delighted to welcome Chad to the global Aid Management Program family. Chad marks our 24th AMP country, our 16th African partner government, and another of our 20+ UNDP-supported AMP programs. We are looking forward to a productive partnership in the years to come.