Towards open development: Leveraging open data to improve the planning and coordination of international aid

The purpose of this article is to examine how aid agencies are strategically leveraging open data to improve the effectiveness of aid. Recognizing the vital role of information in international development, aid agencies have eagerly begun to adopt the tools of Open Government within the context of development (i.e. “Open Development”). Examining this trend, the author finds much scope for open data to support the development community's commitment to improving the effectiveness of aid by adopting a more systematic, coherent, and strategic approach to aid delivery (known as the “aid effectiveness” agenda). An investigation of the current state of the art finds that open data has made significant contributions towards realizing this more integrated vision of aid delivery, but that much of open data's potential remains unexplored. In particular, the use of open data is still largely focused on supporting after-the-fact reporting functions, overlooking its potential to enable integrated strategic planning and improved coordination across the full spectrum of development actors.