PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: NGO AID MAP
organizations make smarter decisions about where to direct their resources, identify gaps and avoid duplication, and find opportunities to collaborate and cooperate with potential partners. So far, we’ve collected information on more than 9,000 projects from over 130 organizations in more than 150 countries, amounting to over $10.6 billion in programs. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about how to make data matter. CHARTING A NEW COURSE IN THE WAKE OF DISASTER
Screenshot of NGO Aid Map's project list in Haiti, where this initiative began. Check it out: haiti.ngoaidmap.org.
Mapping Disasters and Development By Julie Montgomery and Laia Griñó, InterAction Whether it’s from seasoned practitioners or those new to international development or humanitarian relief, we hear it all the time. An NGO working on a project later learns that another organization is doing similar work nearby, or even in the same location. The government of a country receiving aid has trouble planning its budget because it doesn’t know how much funding is being provided when, or which NGOs are working in their country. One community receives an over-abundance of assistance while another with greater needs is ignored. For the past six years, InterAction has been working on the development of an interactive, user-friendly visualization tool
called NGO Aid Map that is based on the premise that access to timely, high quality, and comprehensive information is critical to making aid work better. In part, the tool is meant to help InterAction tell the story of our members, a collective community of more than 180 NGOs working to advance human dignity and fight poverty around the world. But what we’re really trying to do is help address some of the common challenges faced by organizations working to eliminate poverty or respond to humanitarian crises: duplication of efforts, lack of coordination, and inappropriately (or sub-optimally) targeted aid. By making it easy to find information on who is doing what and where, NGO Aid Map aims to help
NGO Aid Map began in Haiti. Though we had been working with our members for some time on ways to help capture and visualize their work, it was not until the devastating 2010 earthquake that the mapping initiative really took off. The scale of the earthquake, intensity of media coverage, and depth of the public response created a sense of urgency and made organizations realize the importance of sharing information on their activities. It was clear that NGOs had to demonstrate to their donors and the general public that they were willing to be held accountable. By June 2010, we had created a map that allowed our members to see not only where work in Haiti was taking place, but the nature of the work being done. Knowing that it would take time before our members were ready to contribute data on all of their work – and before we would have the capacity to handle all that data – we decided to expand the site slowly, one map at a time. This year, at our annual conference in June 2014, we finally reached a major milestone in the initiative, launching a global map covering NTEN CHANGE | DECEMBER 2014
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