The Liberia Development Dashboard

This blog was originally published by ODI Global.

Development cooperation is going through transformational change. Countries in the Global South are facing pressing development challenges, with sustained needs and populations increasingly impatient with the pace of development in a highly connected world. At the same time, budgetary pressures and political changes in donor countries are leading to a reduction in support for official development assistance (ODA). In this context, it has become more important than ever to ensure that available funding is being used well.

Since 2019, funded by Sweden, ODI Global has been working with the Liberian Ministry of Finance and Development Planning to build a system to track development funding and activities: the Liberia Development Dashboard. Development cooperation is hugely important in the country: in 2024, Liberia’s development partners disbursed a total of $513.1 million against total government expenditure of $735.6 million.

Financials, results, and alignment

The Dashboard, developed by ODI Global and Emergentally, was made public in 2020, and tracking began in June 2023. Since then, it has been visited over 38,000 times (and almost 20,000 times in the last 12 months). The Dashboard includes user-friendly but powerful visual graphics, with summaries of planned and actual spending by funder, sector, sustainable development goals (SDGs) and location (e.g. counties). It also includes summary and detailed information on results achieved by specific projects, and progress against the National Development Plan, the ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development, including the progress of national development indicators. Data is of increasingly high quality and easy to enter and keep up to date. All the data is publicly available and can be downloaded in various formats.

Other systems – often called AIMS, or Aid Information Management Systems – provide similar functionality, but their track record is not very strong; they can be hard to maintain, leading to poor-quality data and limited use. This is why, when delivering the Dashboard, we paid particular attention to simplicity and usability.

We made data collection forms simpler and more user-friendly, while allowing data to be uploaded from Excel and imported from IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Liberia is the first country in the world to import IATI data, significantly reducing the burden of data collection while improving the quality of data collected. We also worked to ensure the data was useful and usable by a wide range of stakeholders.

Improving development effectiveness

The Dashboard is the main data source for quarterly and annual development assistance reports. It is also used for sectoral coordination, e.g. to see which development partners are most active and in which counties they are working. It is used to support relations with development partners, including in portfolio reviews and in briefings to ministers. It is used at different stages of the budget process, to manage counterpart funding requirements, and to improve disbursement rates and track project performance. Finally, it captures the new national development plan indicators. Activities are mapped against the national development plan, ensuring a more strategic allocation of resources going forward.

Liberia provided concrete use examples at last year’s IATI Members’ Assembly in Bogotá, Colombia. When the President wanted information on energy projects, it took less than half an hour to extract the data required to make a decision on new loans, considering implementation progress to date. This used both detailed financial and results data. In another case, location mapping data in the Dashboard was used in an analysis of food security by identifying feeder road projects that made more remote parts of the country accessible.

We know informally that development partners have used the system to coordinate among themselves; in one case, two development partners realised that they were working in the same subsector in the same counties. Development partners have used the Dashboard when designing new projects and programmes, as the data gives them a ready overview of existing activities.

How other actors are using the data

A large number of external actors are also using the data. Journalists have used the Dashboard to understand the scale of USAID support, and to investigate the impact of USAID cuts on NGOs. Academics consulted the data as part of an analysis of power dynamics in the health sector, providing recommendations for the development of context-specific capacity-building for CSOs, and research into the Blue Economy in the Gulf of Guinea. Finally, the data has been used as an input to economic analysis by the World Bank and internal analysis by the IMF. The Dashboard has recently been adopted by Nigeria, and has already been used by donors to see which organisations USAID was funding there.

Sustainability

Sustainability of the Dashboard has been a key concern. The most important aspect of this is strengthening the value proposition: ensuring the system is useful to a range of stakeholders, while minimising the burden of keeping it going. Long-term, flexible grant support from the Swedish Embassy gave us the time and resources to develop a strong system with a clear value proposition. Day-to-day management of the system and all data entry is undertaken by MFDP, and the Dashboard is now hosted on Liberian government servers. Funding ongoing development and adding new features, to maintain the relevance of the system in an evolving policy context, is also to some extent about the value proposition: stakeholders will invest in a system if it is delivering value. But it is also about minimising the cost, which we are doing through offering the system in other countries and contexts. While each context is different, many needs are shared, enabling economies of scale.

Conclusions

The upgraded Liberia Development Dashboard was launched in November 2025, including additional features on NGO registration, accreditation and reporting. The intention is to both streamling processes and increase the focus on development outcomes, in an era of increasingly scarce resources.

The Dashboard has proved useful to a broad array of actors, in government, among development partners, and throughout media and NGOs. This is a model that could be adopted by other countries.

Could the Development Dashboard be useful in your context? Get in touch with us.