To communicate results with even more clarity, the African Development Bank (AfDB) on Wednesday, May 21, in Kigali, unveiled 'MapAfrica' an interactive, online platform that charts the Bank's intervention on the African continent.
The portal was unveiled during the Bank's Annual Meetings as part of the signature Financial and Development Effectiveness Presentation.
The new geocoding tool was developed by the Bank in partnership with AidData.
AidData provides products and services that promote the dissemination, analysis and understanding of development finance information by enabling information more accessible and actionable. Such geocoded data will be an important feature of the MapAfrica platform designed to help people visualize, at a glance, specific projects in the future where AfDB is intervening across the continent.
MapAfrica helps the Bank to ensure it allocates its resources to greatest effect. At the same time, it will give its stakeholders a better understanding of the Bank's activities and their impact on local development.
Unveiling the platform, Simon Mizrahi, Director of AfDB's Quality Control and Results Department, said: "Growth is about improving people's lives and creating conducive economic and social conditions to enable Africans live longer and more meaningful lives. This map will enable the Bank to provide transparent and equal access to its work across Africa."
MapAfrica is part of the AfDB's commitment to providing transparent access to its work and to show clearly where it is achieving results on the ground.
"MapAfrica allows us to present our investments and results in a simple way, bringing us closer to the people we serve," Mizrahi added.
He stated that donors provide billions of dollars in the development assistance every year, but fast-tracking the implementation results of the Bank has been quite challenging without granular information on individual development aid activities.
With MapAfrica, web users will be in position to track the Bank's projects across Africa by simply zooming in on a specific region or country.
For different perspectives on AfDB's project portfolio, users can select individual country maps to view all projects within a country, or choose one project point on a map in order to see all other related locations for the project throughout the country.
The special initiative will allow the Bank to keep track on performance of its operations on the continent and the results they deliver.
According to AidData Steering Committee Member and Development Gateway CEO Jean-Louis Sarbib, the web-based platform provides an opportunity to users to examine the impact the AfDB is making towards achieving Africa's growth.
"People will be able to participate in the development process and improve its effectiveness using MapAfrica," he added.
MapAfrica contains more than 6,000 geocoded project locations and users can filter those project locations by country, sector and year.
Users will also be able to select one project and view all implementation locations, providing an accurate sense of the scope and breadth of the project.
In the future, the tool will help the Bank to improve planning of its projects on the ground and to understand where the development gaps lie and which donors are working on which projects to address these gaps, thus helping everyone involved to make more informed choices.
