The Southeast Asia Aid Map consists of data on more than 100,000 projects and activities across all Southeast Asian nations from 97 development partners, with complete data from 2015 to 2021 and partially complete data for 2022 and 2023. This raw data is freely available on the Southeast Asia Aid Map interactive platform, allowing users to drill down and manipulate the data in a variety of ways.
Key concepts
Official development finance (ODF) refers to public funds provided by governments and international organisations to promote economic and social development in low- and middle-income countries. It is the combination of official development assistance (ODA) and other official flows (OOF).
Official development assistance (ODA) is defined as financial flows that are provided by official agencies and are administered with the promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries as the main objective and are concessional in character.
Other official flows (OOF) consist of financial flows that do not meet the conditions for ODA either because they are not primarily aimed at development or because they do not meet Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concessionality standards.
Development partners
A development partner is an entity, such as a government or organisation, that provides foreign assistance to support economic and social development in other countries. The Aid Map focuses on 97 official agencies or partners, both bilateral and multilateral.
Recipients
The recipient countries in alphabetical order are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam.
Committed vs spent
There is an important distinction between what development partners have committed in the region and what they have actually spent. Large commitments, typically in infrastructure, can often take a long time to disburse, meaning commitments can often overstate a partner’s overall footprint. Spent funds are a better indication of annual flows into the region.
Sectors
Sectors have been drawn from the OECD sector categories and condensed for formatting purposes. The sectors are: agriculture, forestry, and fishing; banking and financial services; communications; education; energy; general environmental protection; government and civil society; health; humanitarian aid; industry, mining, and construction; transport and storage; water and sanitation; and other/unspecified.
Sources
There are two major existing databases for tracking aid and development finance: the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Unfortunately, neither dataset has comprehensive reporting on new but significant partners such as India, China, and Taiwan. Steps have been taken by the Aid Map team to both fill the gaps in existing reporting mechanisms and validate what has been reported through official channels. The team collected, cleaned, and analysed data from open sources such as government budget documents, press releases, news media and social media, and websites of resident embassies. These sources are available via hyperlinks in the Aid Map database.
This approach, while detailed, will never be entirely comprehensive and some projects will likely be missing, especially from non-traditional partners. However, we are confident that this approach has produced the most complete picture of non-traditional development partner activities to date.
Climate development finance
The OECD policy marker system provides an indication of the degree of mainstreaming a policy goal receives within an ODF project. A modified version of the OECD’s marker system for climate has been applied to all projects in the Aid Map dataset, sorting projects into three categories: ‘principal’, where climate change mitigation or adaptation is explicitly stated as fundamental to the project; ‘significant’, where climate change mitigation or adaptation is explicitly stated but not fundamental; and ‘not climate-related’, where climate change mitigation or adaptation is not targeted in any significant way. The Aid Map team has taken at face value the climate relevance marking given to projects by those development partners who self-report using the OECD system. For those partners who do not report, each project has been allocated a rating based on relevant criteria such as partner information, Sustainable Development Goal indicators, and OECD sub-sectors.
Data caveats
The research covers the time period from 2015 to 2021. Data for 2022 and 2023 is partially complete and not representative of all aid flows to the region. Data for non-traditional development partners is likely to be incomplete. Additionally, the OECD relies on partner self-reporting of OOF flows, and partners report into it to varying degrees. It likely understates the actual volume of OOF being transferred to the region.
Review process
The clean dataset was provided to both recipient and main partner governments and organisations for confirmation. The full methodology and a representative subset of the data was sent to an independent, external organisation for robust peer review and to validate, test, and recreate the results.
Currency
All currency is quoted in US dollars.