The College of William and Mary has been awarded a federal grant of $25 million to lead in the development of a program that better monitors foreign aid.
The grant is awarded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to increase global aid transparency through the AidData Center for Development Policy.
This Center will create geospatial data and tools to enable the global development community to more effectively target, monitor and evaluate foreign aid.
The project is a joint venture between William & Mary, Development Gateway, Brigham Young University (BYU), the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and ESRI, a GIS technology company, and will be headquartered at William & Mary's Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations in Williamsburg, Virginia.
"AidData is fundamentally improving the way the U.S. development and defense communities track the distribution and impact of their overseas investments," said W&M Chancellor and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates '65.
AidData was formed in 2009 through the merger of two existing programs: Project-Level Aid (PLAID) and Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA), but it is now recognized as the largest public access database on project-level development finance in the world.
The project tracks more than $5.5 trillion and one million development projects from 91 donor agencies.
Now with AidData Center for Development, foreign aid transfer becomes much more transparent and aids in keeping track of the money.
"U.S. citizens are happy to invest some of their taxpayer dollars in efforts to combat disease, poverty and environmental degradation," said Michael Tierney, director of the new center.
"They are not happy to see their money spent to prop up corrupt governments. Making aid transparent reduces opportunities for waste and corruption."
By developing new data collection and standardization systems, AidData hopes to make it easier for governments, aid agencies, intended beneficiaries, civil society organizations, journalists and researchers to track the distribution and impact of aid.
