Data-driven development for emerging economies
Working with Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, we developed a prototype Dashboard to track development cooperation projects, as well as projects financed from the federal budget. We made a range of improvements to the Dashboard as part of this work.
At the 2024 IATI Meetings in Bogotá, Colombia, Emergentally was proud to announce the second country to adopt the Development Dashboard, Nigeria.
Over the course of a year, we worked with the Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning to design and adapt the Dashboard to the Nigerian context.
Firstly, we ensured that the Dashboard can flexibly handle each country’s set of national classifications. In the case of Nigeria, this meant including the seven National Development Plan pillars. Secondly, we developed a mapping between the OECD DAC CRS sectors generally used by development partners in their IATI data and Nigeria’s national sectors. This means that we can present IATI data according to the national sectors.
We significantly improved the way that text is displayed in the interface, to adapt language to the Nigerian context. This also helped us make a big step forward towards our goal of making the interface available in more languages. We adjusted the style of the interface to be consistent with other Nigeria federal government websites.
We significantly improved our IATI import process. The Development Dashboard is currently the only IATI integration being used on an ongoing basis. We built on our experience of using IATI data to provide compatibility for more DPs, now capturing data for 11 DPs.
Given the federal nature of Nigeria, We also further improved the visualisation of data by state, making it easy to see where activities are taking place.
We also improved filtering of activities, to make it possible to serch by multiple options (e.g. Health + Education). We similarly made it possible to select multiple fiscal years in tables and charts.
The Dashboard has since been presented at international meetings in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and most recently at the Financing for Development Side event in New York. The Government of Nigeria noted that:
Transparency and aid effectiveness are critical for us... Recently we upgraded our Aid Information Management System to integrate IATI data. This helps us in so many ways -- including comprehensiveness and timeliness of data, and end to end traceability of resource flows.
Henry Asor Nkang, Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Government of Nigeria
The Government of Nigeria shared more information about their vision for FfD4 on the GPEDC Blog.
Finally, the improvements that we’ve made based on the investment and feedback received from Nigeria are already available on the Liberia Project Dashboard. We have set up robust deployment processes which make it easy, secure, and error-free to deploy improvements as soon as they are available.