The international aid coordination team launched http://OPENAID.GOV.UA – a database of international aid projects and various tools for donors, executors, and journalists – into test operation. According to the initiators, the country has not yet had such a single public register.
This is the Unified register, with the possibility to view the list of donors, programs and reforms under which assistance is provided, searching by category. According to the API, everything is collected manually and by web scraping from donor sites, there are two electronic services for submitting documents: for project registration and accreditation of performers (international organizations), analytics, news, events, presentations.
A big New Year’s #win from the international aid coordination team – the same grants that everyone loves so much. We have put into test operation http://OPENAID.GOV.UA – a database of international aid projects and various tools for donors, performers, and journalists!
1) it is probably hard for you to believe (and maybe not anymore), but there was NO such single public register in the country. There was a certain sign in the MERT, there were paper registration cards (Donor so-and-so will start the project Improving governance in the village for $5 million!) – and that was it.
2) it’s bad with project reports. Often no one provides them. Sometimes they are given when the relevance has already disappeared. What is written there is not always clear. When the project is closed, its site dies, everything disappears (and often, who knows what kind of site it is?)…
3) the entire document flow is, of course, paper, everyone calls – speed up the registration for this! deliver a copy of this. The most frequent request to the department is what donor programs exist in this direction?
4) communication of donors (foreign countries, international organizations, EU, OECD), beneficiaries (state executive bodies), recipients (state bodies and organizations, NGOs, private companies, citizens), executors (international companies, organizations, Ukrainian private companies) passes through us, past us, through other organs, etc.
We are trying to change all this!
– Single register, with search and categories.
– Using the API, manually and web scraping, they took everything they could from the donor sites
– everything we had was scanned
– two electronic document submission services: for project registration and accreditation of executors (international organizations)
– analytics
– news, events, presentations
– where there is no historical information – a problem 🙁 We will search further… Well, we will already fill the new projects with quality.
– in the future, we want to make online offices of all participants in the process, online reports, subscription to announcements about grants and tenders, an integrated tool for creating websites of international aid projects, in the form of an Openaid sub-site, etc.
Project manager Oksana Borysenko carried all this on her fragile shoulders! Oksana, her large team of volunteers (believe me – proofreading these tight texts and correcting mistakes is banal – hellish work!) – very cool!!! Congratulations to Olena Tregub, Olena Levchuk, Alina Shved and everyone in the department!
PS as usual, the country’s budget was not affected. Funds for programming were provided by the EU Delegation (Thanks to the European Union in Ukraine!), the rest of the work was done for free.