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Abuja, Nigeria//- — As African governments confront rising financing costs, constrained aid, mounting debt pressures and an urgent need to mobilise new capital for development, ONE Data, an initiative of the ONE Campaign, today launched the Development Finance Observatory (DFO): a free AI platform that gives journalists, researchers, policymakers and civil society groups a faster, clearer way to follow the money.
The DFO brings together aid, domestic budget and debt data that previously sat scattered across the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and other sources.
Users ask questions in plain language instead of navigating raw spreadsheets, and calculations and visualisations that once took months now take minutes. Every number is traceable to a specific source, which guards against AI hallucination and lets journalists verify a figure before they publish it.
More than ever, development finance is consequential to Africa’s economic future. Governments must finance infrastructure, health, climate action and jobs amid higher borrowing costs, declining concessional finance and tighter fiscal space, and as they diversify beyond aid, the quality and terms of finance matter as much as the quantity.
Yet the information needed to scrutinise those choices lies across governments, development institutions, financial databases and project documents, making it difficult to compare countries or financing instruments. The Observatory is designed to close that gap.
“We believe policy makers who make decisions that impact millions of people’s lives deserve world class insights,” said David McNair, Managing Director of ONE Data. “We built the Development Finance Observatory so that policymakers, journalists and citizens can get the answers they need in seconds with the confidence that those answers are right. Better data means better decisions…better decisions mean a better quality of life for people around the world.”
For African business and economics journalists, the value is not simply more data. It is the ability to turn complex financial information into questions audiences care about, from the day a loan is announced to the investigation that follows. This heralds the shift from reporting how much money was announced to investigating what that money means.
A $1 billion financing announcement is not, by itself, a development story. For African newsrooms, the DFO offers a new way to interrogate the questions that matter most to citizens and policymakers: Who is financing Africa? On what terms? Where is the money going? Who benefits? What does it cost? And what is it actually achieving?
“The development finance landscape is being rewritten in real time, and we cannot build a better system without understanding how money is actually moving,” said Mike Muldoon, Chief Executive Officer of RF Catalytic Capital (RFCC), The Rockefeller Foundation’s independent charitable affiliate.
“The Development Finance Observatory gives leaders a clearer picture of aid, debt, private capital, and other financial flows so they can make faster, smarter decisions about where limited resources can have the greatest impact. As we rethink the future of development, tools like this can help move us toward a system that is more transparent, more accountable, and ultimately more effective.”
Rather than relying solely on announcements from governments, development institutions or investors, journalists can test the numbers behind them independently. The ambition is not simply to make development finance more visible. It is to make it more interrogable. As Africa takes a more assertive role in shaping its own economic future, that capability now sits with those who explain the economy to the public.
ONE Data, Google.org and The Rockefeller Foundation announced their intention to build the Development Finance Observatory in January, with $4 million in combined funding.
The platform is built on Data Commons by Google, with support from RFCC. The Development Finance Observatory is free to use at developmentfinance.org.
“Data Commons was built so organizations like ONE can focus on solving the world’s biggest challenges without worrying about data storage and APIs,” said Prem Ramaswami, Head of Google Data Commons. “Unifying isolated datasets into a single, AI-ready foundation removes the heavy infrastructure work. With the Development Finance Observatory, ONE can focus on turning that shared foundation into immediate impact for global development.”
