#cgdev

Podcast by: CGD Podcast by Rajesh Mirchandani Duration: 17:01

There’s a very short Wikipedia stub on Development Finance Institutions or DFIs, which says: “A development finance institution (DFI) is an alternative financial institution which includes microfinance institutions, community development financial institution and revolving loan funds. These institutions provide a crucial role in providing credit in the form of higher risk loans, equity positions and risk guarantee instruments to private sector investments in developing countries. DFIs are backed by states with developed economies. In 2005, total commitments (as loans, equity, guarantees and debt securities) of the major regional, multilateral and bilateral DFIs totalled US$45 billion (US$21.3 billion of which went to support the private sector). 

DFIs provide finance to the private sector for investments that promote development and to help companies to invest, especially in countries with various restrictions on the market.”

OPIC or the Overseas Private Investment Corporation is the US Government’s DFI, which CDC is the UK Government’s DFI. The two, with a portfolio of almost 25 billion dollars, are among the largest bilateral DFIs. I recently read an article on The Guardian about legislation to ”lift the cap on aid funds spent through the CDC from £1.5bn to £6bn”. In this Center for Global Development Podcast, Rajesh Michandani questions OPIC and CDC heads about the choice of countries they invest in, which has been criticized.

Via Scott Gilmore on twitter

A fantastic post from CGDev on where all that money donors gave to Haiti ended up. Spoiler alert: we don't really know where most of it ended up, but only 0.02% of USAID money went to Haitian firms and businesses.

1. Rage. Rage hard.

FORMA is a new tool for monitoring forest loss at high spatial resolution ~1km at quarter year intervals. It was designed to measure, track, and enable action against forest loss that is contributing to global CO2 emissions, in support of the UN-REDD program. While FORMA is not designed to directly analyse ecosystem service loss or degradation of natural capital, the links are readily apparent, as well are the links to the Map of Life project. The FORMA project represents a significant step forward in open informatics framework thinking, and states,

For accountability, the global community will need access to a monitoring system that provides detailed, accurate and timely identification of deforestation in conservation-payment areas. To ensure the broadest access and credibility, the monitoring system should be truly transparent and reproducible, making data, algorithms and processing workflows publically available and usable in free or inexpensive software.

The authors indicate that FORMA is a prototype system that should be updated and improved by specialists. I would love to see the system they have build designed as a framework where the models could be improved, reviewed, and deployed to generate global predictions of forest loss. Beyond that, I would love to see the data easily integrated into secondary analysis, such as the prediction of lost services and degradation of natural capital. The models necessary to predict either of the later could be deployed in the same framework, where models are proposed, tested, reviewed and deployed, and then the data could be made freely available.

Another future step for FORMA would be the integration of ground-truthing into outputs and model inputs such as crowd-sourced contributions of visually vetted high-resolution landsat images from the same areas over the same time. This could be a project of widespread interest and similar crowd sourcing informatics systems have already been developed for other scientific questions (see Vizzuality and Zooniverse).

The team behind FORMA do not see CGDEV as the final home for FORMA but more important they will keep it completely open source, hoping to encourage multiple deployments that will spurn honesty and innovation. FORMA is leaps and bounds ahead of any other project in terms of their thinking toward data openness and the need for transparent informatics pipelines and algorithms.