Geography and Aid- or why interactive mapping is a gamechanger for development ?

Geography matters for international development! This seems to be an obvious statement, but what does this actually mean for development policies and the design and implementation of development programs? At the outset, let me highlight some of the key questions how the use of geospatial data and digital innovations can play a critical role on enhancing the effectiveness, openness and inclusiveness of international development:

1) To what extent are international aid flows responsive to local needs?

2.       How to enhance the social accountability of development aid?

3.       How to improve the impact of development assistance on improving the well-being of poor communities?

On several occasions, I participate in the annual AidData Conferences. During the discussion, I was intrigued by the group’s creativity and commitment to developing new theoretical approaches to understanding the effects of development aid, and to finding practical solutions to convert data on aid flows (the portal contains approximately 1 Million records of DAC and non-DAC donors) into information and analysis that becomes actionable information for policymakers.  

During the conference, I made a presentation on Inter-active Mapping and Crowdsourcing and how these approaches can provide innovative and creative solutions to improve aid transparency and effectiveness and critically to enhance the social accountability of donors and intranational development programs.  At the core of these approaches stands the need to acknowledge the link between Geography and Aid.

• Why does it matter to analyze aid flows in geographic terms?
• What value does spatial analysis add to policy debates and the concrete challenges of enhancing donor coordination particularly at the sub-national level?

Several years ago, I read and was fascinated by the book Geography and Trade by Paul Krugman. The main point raised in his groundbreaking work was that international trade theories completely overlooked the issue of geography. He went on to show that agglomeration effects matter a great deal when trying to explain the effects of trade on a country. Along the lines of Krugman’s work , I strongly believe that Geography matters a great deal to the Development Effectiveness, Transparency and Inclusion agenda set out by the Paris Declaration and the follow-up Accra Conference. Here are basic arguments for why we should care:

·       In today’s globalized economy and society, the economic and social inequalities within countries have increased  dramatically, whereby the emerging new middle class in China, India or Brazil has more in common in terms of living conditions and social opportunities with the middle class in the developed world than with poor communities within their own country. In other words, there is increasing evidence for a clear and direct correlation between poverty, geography and ethnicity.

·       The goals set forward by the SDGs, particularly maternal and infant mortality rates will not be met, if there continue to exist extreme pockets of poverty concentrated in certain regions within developing countries

·       How can we know whether or not individual projects and programs  are adequately targeted to fight poverty and to improve the well-being of the most vulnerable groups; and how can we know whether the large number of existing donor programs (i.e. more than 200 donor-funded projects exist in Bolivia in education alone) contribute to reaching the SDGs?

·       Finally, how can citizens and the so-called  ‘project beneficiaries’ participate and derive any meaningful benefits, if they don’t even know where multiple donor programs are planned and located?

Why can’t international donors and project managers think more in terms of the geography and location of their programs? Imagine if we could develop a fully transparent and open map of all donor activities showing the geographic location of all programs within a single country. Imagine the potentially transformative role open geospatial data, inter-active mapping tools and the establishment of direct feedback loops between citizens and donors facilitated by mobile technology could provide to improve the impact of development programs on the ground. Imagine an openstreetmaps that helped citizens map where projects actually touch the ground and contrast that with what projects were planned by a Government or donor? This is where citizens’ voices and the often abstract notion of social accountability converge.   The possibilities today are enormous, exciting and potentially game-changing. The advent of mobile and mapping based tools that reach the citizen directly create new possibilities to create maps and other visualizations that clearly show what’s working, what’s not, and where the gaps lie.

PS: original article: Gigler, Bjorn-Soren: "Development and Aid", World Bank, March, 2010.

This article was an early call for action to leverage the power of open #geospatial data, #disruptive technologies and interactive mapping platforms to enhance the effectiveness, openness and inclusiveness of development programs. The article contributed to the development of the World Bank's Mapping for Results program, which for the first time putting all World Bank-funded development projects on a map.

I thought to republish this article again, since the outcomes of the recent SDG Summit have demonstrated that the topic of enhanced development effectiveness, social accountability and aid transparency continue to be critical for achieving the SDGs until 2030. There is an urgent need to focus our attention on the SDGs and the fight against the global crisis of poverty, hunger, fragility and climate change. Lets collaborate by leveraging the most innovative ideas and use of digital technologies as an enabler for development and improving the human well-being of poor and marginalized communities.