In any given year, more than US$2 billion in aid is invested in the Pacific by more than 60 donors. Almost half comes from Australia. Public information at the project level for all donors is often sparse, lacks detail, and is difficult to access.

The Pacific Aid Map is an analytical tool designed to enhance aid effectiveness in the Pacific by improving coordination and accountability of foreign aid through enhanced transparency of aid flows. Over the past 18 months, the team working on the Pacific Aid Map has collected data on close to 13,000 projects from 62 donors in 14 countries from 2011 onwards. This raw data has been made freely available on an interactive platform, allowing users to investigate and manipulate the data.

The Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map will not just be a snapshot in time. We will update the Map annually until at least 2021. Should there be sufficient demand, and if it leads to improved aid investments in the region, we are eager to continue the project in the years beyond.

The Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map will not only be useful for Pacific island countries and aid practitioners. The interactive tool can contribute to more nuanced public discussion about the role of aid in the region, which was a lively debate in 2018. It is a rich database that will be valuable for future scholarly work into foreign aid in the Pacific. Investigating trends in sub-sectoral engagement, scholarships, implementing partners, regional investments, flows from new donors, aid predictability and concentration are all areas that warrant further exploring and could benefit from the data found in the Pacific Aid Map.

Lowy Institute researchers will be teasing out our own conclusions, as well as adding more features to the Pacific Aid Map, in the months ahead.