About the prototype Somalia Local Activity Explorer

The 2016 Grand Bargain committed signatories to Greater Transparency and More support and funding tools for local and national responders in humanitarian aid response. The transparency commitments included publication of data using the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). However, there is currently a limited coverage of activities from local and national responders in IATI data. As a result, much of their work remains effectively invisible internationally.

Another useful source of aid-activity information is the humanitarian 3W (Who? What? Where?) reports compiled by UN OCHA country offices. These contain much more information about local actors, and often report activities at a more local level than IATI. However, they're intended only as point-in-time operational snapshots, not as permanent transparency records, so they lack much of the information that IATI publishers include about their activities.

This prototype explores the feasibility of combining the two information sources to provide a fuller picture of aid work in a country, especially those activities carried out by local and national actors at a local level. Often, international actors appear in both the IATI and 3W information, so the prototype is able to extract information about relationships of different kinds. For example:

• What sectors does a local/national actor typically work in?
• Where do local/national actors work most?
• What organisations do local/national actors most commonly partner with (both in Somalia and internationally)?
• What local/national actors does each regional/international actor typically partner with, and what kinds of work do they fund?

We hope this information will be helpful primarily for local and national organisations, in helping to get the word out about the foundational aid work they do, and in helping them to discover new opportunities for partnership and funding. We also believe that this new way of looking at aid information &endash; as a network of relationships rather than a single chain of funding &endash; will be valuable for all aid actors, everywhere.

Feedback

We welcome your feedback! We're interested to hear if you have ideas about how we can improve the explorer, the data, or how this could be used in future. Get in touch with us: humportal@devinit.org.

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