The Development Gateway: Towards a new Aid Architecture

The other day I posted on the need to evolve or create better institutions for the connection of aid donors and aid seekers. Basically I noted that large donor and government organizations have developed to coordinate development assistance, but the proliferation of agencies and projects is making coordination difficult. I wondered whether the Information Revolution would allow new institutional forms.

KIVA is a very small step in the right direction. It is an online site providing disintermediation. Individuals can directly make loans to microenterprises in developing nations. Information needed to make good loans is provided by cooperating non-governmental micro-finance organizations.

Now my friends Denisa Popescu and Carlos Braga have written "An Evolving Vision" for ICTUpdate, a magazine published by CTA (The Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation APC-EU) on the history of the Development Gateway. They point out that

"with more than 260,000 registered users and 800,000 unique visitors per month in mid-2007, the Development Gateway is the largest searchable repository of development information and tools on the internet.....Country gateways, another core initiative, were locally owned projects designed to provide online and offline technical services for e-government, small enterprise support, e-learning, e-health, and online community building. They were seen not only as local versions of the global portal, but also as nodes of the broader network with the Gateway at its core. They were expected to adapt to local conditions, languages and needs, while establishing systems to access, maintain and disseminate local knowledge......The Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA) was set up as an online database of development projects and activities provided by over 200 agencies. More recently, the Gateway, in collaboration with the government of Ethiopia, launched the Aid Management Platform (AMP) to assist governments and donors in planning, monitoring and reporting on international aid flows and activities. Transparency of public sector transactions, in turn, was promoted by dgMarket, an online service that posts tenders for government contracts funded by the Bank and other agencies, as well as national tenders."

I don't think that the Development Gateway is now an major improvement in the coordination of development assistance, but it illustrates what can be done using the potential inherent in the Internet and computer technology. The Development Gateway is a relatively small effort, at least when seen against the tens of billions of dollars of development assistance provided every year and the magnitude of the development problem. But I think it is a step in the right direction.