Why Donor Tracking
Tracking of donor funding during and following crisis situations is critical.
The Science of Implementation Initiative’s tracking is unique for the following reasons:
First, we are the only entity that tracks humanitarian and development funding following crises from the perspective of the recipient government.
What we track and how we present the information is purely and consistently with the government as the primary audience.
Second, we differentiate between new funds and old funds.
Our COVID-19 tracking for example, will highlight what funding was reprogrammed.
Third, our tracking highlights what modalities were used.
For example, we track not just how much money was disbursed but where did the money go. Did it go to budget support, to international or national NGOs?
Fourth, our data is fact-checked.
We do not rely on publicly available information or press releases because we know they are incomplete. We also do not allow self-reporting from donors because we know that that information is incomplete. We have very clear definitions of what constitutes a pledge and a disbursement. Disbursement must be funding out of the donor’s bank account and into a recipient bank account.
Fifth, our tracking effort is a multi-year effort.
We have learned that it is critical to track funding until all the funds are expended or until we are able to hand over our tracking efforts to recipient governments.
And sixth, our tracking effort is among the least expensive of its kind.
We operate on a very modest budget.
The data gathered by our team on the Haiti earthquake recovery, cholera elimination and Ebola responses has been reported as the official figures used by recipient governments, academics, policymakers and the media. The data has been cited in leading publications such as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, NPR, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, national media based in recipient countries as well as by think tanks.
Background
In 2009, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon asked President Bill Clinton and Dr. Paul Farmer to lead the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti (OSE). The OSE was established to support Haiti in its recovery from the four 2008 hurricanes that together amounted to Haiti’s costliest natural disaster since the earthquake of 1842 with damages assessed at approximately $1 billion. Shortly following the creation of the OSE, the team began tracking official development assistance pledged at the 2009 Washington DC international donor conference to ensure that the Government of Haiti would be able to oversee recovery efforts from the hurricanes while holding donors accountable to their pledges. The OSE team embarked on a journey that was unprecedented – tracking the $390 million pledged at a high level UN pledging conference.
Nine months later, at 4:53 pm on January 12, 2010, the OSE team was alerted that a magnitude 7 earthquake had struck a town called Leogane, fifteen miles outside of Port-au-Prince. Within an hour, reports of the devastation began arriving. Within days, it became clear that the main task of the OSE was to help plan for the international pledging conference and then ensure that the pledged funding was tracked over time.
As part of the tracking process, the OSE team, upon President Clinton and Paul Farmer’s request began to track how much of the official development assistance pledged and disbursed to Haiti stayed in-country. This principle, prioritizing ODA to be invested in-country, was set out in the Paris Declaration of 2005 and echoed by OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria in April 2010: “Aid modalities chosen today will have direct effects on the governance, capacity and accountability of Haiti for years to come.”
After the OSE’s mandate ended, no entity continued the tracking of pledges made following the earthquake by analyzing commitments and disbursements against original pledges. Paul Farmer continued to serve on a pro bono basis at the United Nations as a Special Adviser to the Secretary-General until December 2019. In this capacity, he and his small team continued to track official development assistance to Haiti (including donor funding toward cholera elimination), and subsequently tracked donor pledges, commitments and disbursements following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. When Paul Farmer’s ten year stint at the UN ended, his team continued the work they had begun after establishing the Science of Implementation Initiative.