Stockholm, 4 April 2011,

(by Ton Zijlstra)

The Swedish government launched a website and API for foreign aid data, called OpenAid.se, with the following explanation on the about page:

"The Minister for International Development Cooperation has introduced a ‘transparency guarantee’ in development assistance as a way to promote a modern, reality based and transparent aid.

The idea is that everyone who is interested can follow the entire aid chain, from overall decisions on the direction and distribution of aid to specific decisions, payments, implementation and monitoring. Eventually, all actors handling Swedish development assistance funds, e.g. organisations and companies, should be part of this information service."

On the data that is now made available it says: "It currently contains aid information dating from 2007 to 2010. It also contains historical data from the 1970s and forward, in so far as it is available electronically. Openaid.se primarily shows data at contribution level, which makes it possible to follow different contributions and their component parts at both country level and sectoral level."

The API provides the data free for re-use with no restrictions.

The Openaid.se service is being launched as beta, and will be developed further. Currently the data is not yet in the structure of IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, but is clearly aimed in the same direction. This suggests that this is the first step to make sure the data is available to the public, and that one of the next steps will be bringing it in line with IATI more.