Discussing the response to the U.S. funding freeze at the IATI European Community Dialogue in Brussels in March 2025

On January 20th 2025, the U.S. Government ordered a pause of all foreign assistance pending a review of programmes. At Emergentally, we know that this situation has had significant consequences at the country level and we have been working quietly to support our partners and colleagues to respond to the evolving situation. While respecting the sensitivity and confidentiality of our partners, we wanted to share some ways in which we are responding to the rapidly evolving situation. We hope that this information may help others in thinking through their own response. We presented these ideas at the IATI European Community Dialogue last week in Brussels.

Emergentally is thinking about two ways to respond - in the short term and in the medium term.

Short term response

Our short term response is focused on understanding the nature of the funding that is frozen and the consequences. Using IATI data, we can understand what was disbursed in 2024, and estimate spending for 2025, by looking at the undisbursed amount of ongoing projects.

• We have shared compiled datasets of USAID data, or live or prototype versions of the Dashboard containing similar data, with eleven countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We know that in some cases, this data has been used to support government or DP allocation decisions, or present analysis to senior leadership. We are happy to share data with other countries – please reach out to us.
• We improved the Dashboard to more easily visualise implementing organisations. We know that at least one development partner has used this to identify implementing partners which they have in common with USAID, so that they can understand how to adjust their support. Journalists have also used data on the Liberia Project Dashboard to understand the impact on Liberian NGOs.
• We have developed country- and sector-specific analysis, to understand the impacts in particular areas, by subsector, implementing partner, and project. We are working on additional analysis – please reach out to us if you need any support.

Medium term response

Our medium term response is focused on increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of remaining resources.

• We are working to improve the coordination and impact of INGO activities. We released new functionality in the Dashboard to handle data reported at multiple levels of the delivery chain, so that both DPs and their implementing partners can report data without double-counting. The existing M&E features of the Dashboard will allow INGOs to demonstrate their impact at the country level.
• We are improving the coverage of data from traditional development partners. We have begun engaging with large traditional providers to understand how we could import their data to the Dashboard. We also released new functionality to make it easier to find data gaps, and import missing projects from IATI to the Dashboard.
• We have also released new functionality to support improvements in project performance, through summarising results data and disbursement rates.
• We will support a strategic allocation of resources, building on our existing work on alignment, by mapping development resources against the national development plan.

Going forward, we will focus on two additional areas:

• We will improve our coverage of climate finance. We recently supported Nigeria to capture data on SDG13 in the Nigeria Development Cooperation Dashboard. We have identified funding flows which are provided through multilateral development banks, but originated in climate finance funding facilities. We will reach out to providers of climate finance to understand how we could better capture their funding in the Dashboard.
• We will also improve our coverage of south-south cooperation, with a thoughtful approach to capturing technical assistance which goes beyond the monetary value of such cooperation. Using TOSSD data, we have begun to identify south-south cooperation providers with a significant impact at the country level. We will begin engaging more concertedly with providers of south-south cooperation to capture these funding streams in the Dashboard.

We have been engaging with a range of additional countries and sectors to discuss how the Dashboard could be useful in other contexts. We are now able to set up new Dashboards quite rapidly, so if you would like to try out the system, please get in touch.

Finally, we’d like to express our sincere thanks to colleagues who have made USAID’s IATI data publication possible over the years – we appreciate all of the work you have done; this work has made a significant positive contribution to improving effectiveness at country level.