The FAO Land and Water Division developed a new global tool to track drought finance at country level.

The lack of a consistent, comprehensive, and dedicated reporting system is one of the major barriers to assessing the status of drought finance. Over the past 20 years, however, official development assistance has been monitored and registered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  Leveraging this database, FAO has analysed drought-related projects and built drought-specific database that forms a basis for the Drought Finance Tracker.

The FAO Drought Finance Tracker is an innovative and user-friendly platform for the elaboration of statistics and analyses of drought finance. It supports decision-makers to get an overview of the finance trends at global level, download and share statistics about the financial flows, and carry-out advanced analysis for finance flows.

The background of the dataset

The dataset of the Drought Finance Tracker displays the projects that are registered as official development assistance and are related to drought management. 

Database: Drought Finance Tracker is built on the data collected by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC). The database of OECD-DAC is screened for drought as an objective in the Rio-marked projects’ results framework. 
Coverage period: the statistics are available from 2000 to 2021.
Finance source: the statistics rely on international public finance for developing countries, provided by bilateral and multilateral sources. 
Project perspective: the projects are analyzed from “recipient” perspective, meaning that the projects are structured as per the recipient countries.

Details on the parameters

The Drought Finance Tracker provides statistics and analysis which can be filtered according to the following parameters: region, country, year, total budget, sector, financial instrument, and gender. 

• Region: regional projects are included only in the regional analysis and statistics, and not in the country analysis. The countries are displayed and grouped as per FAO’s regional categorization: Africa (RAF), Near East and North Africa (RNE), Asia and the Pacific (RAP), Latin America and the Caribbean (RLC), Europe and Central Asia (REU).
• Country: regional projects are not included in the country analysis and statistics. 
• Year: the datasets span from 2000 to 2021 and is routinely updated.
• Total budget: the statistics on allocated total budget can be expressed as nominal value or in present value (2021).
• Sector: OECD-DAC uses a sector classification specifically developed to track aid flows and to permit measuring the share of each sector (e.g. health, energy, agriculture) or other purpose category "non-sector allocable aid" (e.g. general budget support, humanitarian aid) in total aid. 
• Financial instrument: financial instruments are distinguished as grant or debt instruments.  
• Gender: the gender equality policy marker is used by OECD-DAC members to indicate for each aid activity whether it targets gender equality as a policy objective, by using the following classification
  • Principal - gender equality is the main objective of the project/programme and is fundamental is its design and expected results. The project/programme would not have been undertaken without this objective.
  • Significant - gender equality is an important and deliberate objective, but not the principal reason for undertaking the project/programme, often explained as gender equality being mainstreamed in the project/programme.
  • Not targeted - the project/programme has been screened against the gender marker but has not been found to target gender equality.
    
    (Reference : OECD-DAC gender equality policy marker https://www.oecd.org/dac/gender-development/dac-gender-equality-marker.htm  OECD definitions)

The Drought Finance Tracker is built on the version updated on 20 April 2023.