Foreign aid infographics
We have been looking for some really nice aid data visualisations, but have not really found what we wanted. A lot of it is just data presentation without any deeper thought to design or presentation. While our main objective is to improve financial transactions in foreign aid, we are very aware of the power of good design. From time to time we will therefor making time to push data visualisation as well. Not only as a part of our services but also more general data illustrations and infographics.
We have started out with something of a “proof-of-concept”, making an infographic poster summarising foreign aid (ODA) in 2015 and 2016 based on the latest available data from OECD.
We are really happy with the results, and are now thinking about how we can develop this further. Especially interesting would, of course, be to connect the visualisation directly to a data source, such as IATI, OECD or AidData. So we could use this to push data dynamically (a nice example is ForeignAssistance.gov).
Below is a little breakdown of the different part of the infographic.
Top donors and recipients. The data from OECD didn’t cover recipients 2016, so those figures are a year older. This shows that it would be nice to get some more time on this, and work with more data sources. The results are however very clear on the size of donors and recipients, in absolute terms. But it would good to complement these figures with data that shows data in relation to per capita/percentage of GDP.
The development of total ODA. If its possible to finds some good data sources, it would be interesting to add data about related financial flows, for comparison. For example, non-ODA aid and remittances would really complement the current data.
The above is an example break-down of sector data, on total data. As there are many sectors, this would really benefit from being coded to dynamic data.
If you would like to download the infographics in a big format, just click here. Print it, spread it, use it!
We will be trying to develop this in the future, but would really like your comments. Let us know what you think – @aidhedge.
