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EU Aid Explorer

What is the EU Aid Explorer?

EU Aid Explorer allows you to find comprehensive aggregate data as well as detailed information on international development projects funded by the EU and its Member States. The platform does not alter or interpret the data in any way. EU Aid Explorer is managed by the European Commission's Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA).

The platform is built using European Commission data and open data published by EU Member States to the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard. Data providers are the European Commission (both the EU budget and the European Development Fund), EU Trust Funds, the European Investment Bank and EU Member States. The platform is overseen by DG INTPA units D1 – Effective Development Policy and Team Europe, and R2 – Planning, Budget, Reporting.

In the European Commission, the main providers of development and humanitarian assistance are  the Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA), the Directorate-General for European Neighbourhood Policy And Enlargement Negotiations (DG NEAR), the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) and the Service for Foreign Policy Instruments (FPI).

The EU commitment to Aid Transparency

In the new European Consensus on Development the EU and its Member States reaffirm their commitment to applying the key principles of development effectiveness, among them to enhance
transparency and mutual accountability, and that they will develop tools to present and use development cooperation data more effectively.

With a view to enhance the transparency of the development and humanitarian assistance provided by the EU and its Member States and support the use of this data by all stakeholders, DG INTPA has developed this portal which draws together all the data published to OECD and IATI by EU institutions and Member States. For practical reasons the European Commission data is pulled from the internal IT-systems rather than retrieved from OECD and IATI.

How often is EU Aid Explorer updated?

The data from the European Commission is updated daily while the data from EU Member States and the European Investment Bank is updated monthly. Data from the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) is updated annually.

What is the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS)?

The Creditor Reporting System (CRS) on aid activities from members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), multilateral organisations and other donors. The data are drawn
from replies from the 23 members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), international organisations, and countries that are not part of the DAC. The data are part of the
official statistical reporting to the OECD. The DAC Secretariat is responsible for data processing, quality control and dissemination. It also provides annual aggregate statistics of official development assistance (ODA).

What is IATI?

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a global multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian resources and their results for addressing poverty and crises. At the heart is the IATI Standard, which is a set of rules and guidance for publishing useful development and humanitarian data. To publish data according to the IATI Standard, information needs to be provided in the data format XML. Using this format means fast, machine-readable data can be easily exchanged, compared and combined with other data published in the same way. This data can be converted into less technical formats and be used by digital tools to display the data in charts, graphs and maps. All data published to the IATI Standard is catalogued in the IATI Registry as published.

Why is there data missing in some parts of EU Aid Explorer?

Publishers report their project level data to IATI at varying degrees of detail, and data is updated and continuously improved by the publishers. EU Aid Explorer only visualises what is in the data and does not make any corrections to the information published to IATI. Thus, if geo-locations, policy markers,
results etc. do not appear on the platform, the publisher has not reported this information.