This post is actually a request for help. I’m in Sierra Leone, with crap bandwidth and a lot of statistical information I want to gather. I hardly know where to look. But I have noticed that the people who read this blog are cracker-jack smart, I’m hoping some of you might be able to point me to the best resources for:
- Finding out how much aid money comes into a country, from all donors (or as many as report/can be aggregated) in a given year. I’d like to do multi-year comparisons.
- Finding out what percentage of a country’s employed adults are employed with INGOs or with implementing partners of INGOs (it would of course be awesome if there were data that said “employed in order to implement projects of INGOs” but I’m pretty sure that’s the data equivalent of a prince on a white horse).
- Finding out how much of a country’s financial need by sector is covered by aid (infrastructure, health, education…)
- Finding out what the actual market for skills and for goods (aspirational; one would be fine) of carpenters and tailors in developing economies. I’d prefer country-specific numbers, but I realize that’s just going crazy.
Okay, friends. Make it rain. And thanks!
Hey Jina – have you tried tracking incoming funding through reliefweb http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/fts.nsf/doc105?OpenForm&rc=1&cc=sle
Unfortunately it goes up til 2009 only and it can’t track ALL funding that ever was put into SL, but it does cover the main donors and NGO activities. It’s meant to cover all funding but not everyone gets involved in coordination.
If OCHA still had an office there, they might be able to help. UNDP, maybe, to track sector by sector, worth a shot?
There is also probably a department within one of the ministries which grants licenses to NGOs and INGOs – they might be able to help with staffing numbers.
Hope this helps, not an easy task! L
You can get data for #1 at AidData.org. #2 you’re probably going to have to talk to HR at every NGO individually. #3 is find-outable – you might talk to Owen Barder. Or a government source; they usually have really good data on that kind of thing.
Hey Jina
For the first, you want either the OECD DAC databases (http://stats.oecd.org/qwids/) or AidData (http://www.aiddata.org). The first is narrower but more authoritative. The second has more information and a broader coverage.
I am not aware of any source for the others. For the third, you’d need to make clear what you mean by “financial need by sector”. There are some country-by-country figures for financing gaps to meet individual Millennium Development Goals, but the estimates are pretty rough.
Let us know if there is anything else you need.
Kind regards
Owen
Greetings Jina:
You may have been thru this already – but if you are looking for Africa specifically, the UNCTAD has an annual report on Economic Development in Africa, since 2000. 2010 and past editions are here(all have data / .xls spreadsheets on past years). Note that some countries who are major ‘donors’ of FDI / other development do not make these number public. Please let me know if I can help further.
http://www.unctad.org/Templates/Page.asp?intItemID=3373&lang=1
For your first question, I highly recommend AidData.org. You can run a request that will get you detailed information on aid committed to a country (and sometimes even information on how much was reported as disbursed). Their site is not entirely inclusive, but it is the most exhaustive I’ve seen.
For Sierra Leone, I got this:
http://aiddata.org/search/results;jsessionid=E00AE78C61FCFF0C01781028B62156AA?recipients=252&keywordSearch=
You can then export everything into a handy Excel spreadsheet. You can run searches on more than one country, you can filter by agency, etc. etc. Basically, you can spend lots of Saturday nights filtering data requests on their site. 😉
Jina,
I may not play a development economist on TV, but I am one. And I’m a fan of your work, so hopefully this is helpful:
“Finding out how much aid money comes into a country, from all donors (or as many as report/can be aggregated) in a given year. I’d like to do multi-year comparisons.”
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator
Look under “ODA per capita.”
“Finding out what percentage of a country’s employed adults are employed with INGOs or with implementing partners of INGOs (it would of course be awesome if there were data that said “employed in order to implement projects of INGOs” but I’m pretty sure that’s the data equivalent of a prince on a white horse).”
I don’t know think you will find good data taking this angle, mainly because the distinction between “employed” and “unemployed” isn’t very useful in Africa. Poor people in Africa aren’t usally unemployed per se, they’re just getting very little return for the work they do (as I’m sure you know). Another angle you could take that you might be able to get at least anecdotal data for is the % of vacant positions at important gov’t ministries vs. the number of jobs in the INGO sector (or at least some estimated # of jobs based on the level of ODA). I remember in one country I’ve worked in somebody quoting me a figure on the % of positions in a particular ministry that were unfilled because of shortage of qualified people, certainly part of which was due to the fact that the good people gravitate to where the aid $ are. I think somebody at Center for Global Development was doing research on this kind of thing a few years back, if you want to search around their website it might be under the topic of “capacity” or “absorptive capacity.” Sounds like a great issue to write about, though.
“Finding out how much of a country’s financial need by sector is covered by aid (infrastructure, health, education…) ”
This is a little tricky because it’s hard to define “financial need.” But at that World Bank link I think there is some info on public expenditures, so you could at least look at aid vs. gov’t spending.
“Finding out what the actual market for skills and for goods (aspirational; one would be fine) of carpenters and tailors in developing economies. I’d prefer country-specific numbers, but I realize that’s just going crazy.”
I think you actually could probably get data at least on what the people who work in those sectors earn, potentially for several countries. If you are interested in doing a story about this, let me know what you are thinking and I will see if I can help.
Thanks to you all, you’re fantastic. (How could I forget about AidData?!) It’s great to see so many ways of tackling the question, too, and the pro’s and con’s of each. Thanks also to those who reached out by email. I’m going to be a total data nerd for awhile… I might follow up with some of you by email. Just a warning.:)
Apparently I demanded so much that the robotrons of the Internet mistook my post for a consumeristic plea, and I’ve been linked too by “Caboodle Cosmetics,” with the tag, “Where can I find a Caboodle and a krimper and a straightener?” Oh, it takes me back to the younger and stupider days of very fried hair, because when you used the krimper, you really did believe you also needed the straightener….