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Lifting the Veil on Foreign Assistance and Lobbying
Posted in: Blog, Foreign Assistance, Government, Video by Marco Puccia on December 3, 2009
I’ve been following the Ujima Project for a few months since its launch back in September. It was put together by New York Times reporter Ron Nixon and has partnered with technology partner Appfrica Labs. There are several projects working on AID transparency, including AiDA which is a project run by DC-based Development Gateway where I worked for a while. In fact, I just found out that AiDA will be teaming up with Project-Level Aid (PLAID) and the Secretariat of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee to create a joint, easily accessible and independent repository of aid activities. See the announcement here.
Ujima is described as an investigative reporting tool that uses “reverse transparency” to aggregate foreign assistance data from multiple sources and present it in an open and easily accessible database. One of the most interesting features on Ujima is the “Lobbying” section of the site, where you can access how much the government of Uganda, for instance, is paying for firms to lobby the US government for favorable trade legislation. Here’s a video of Ron Nixon presenting Ujima at TEDxKampala in Uganda. Enjoy!
Also, check out this Appfrica podcast interview with Ron Nixon about the Ujima Project.
