Which countries get the contracts?

About 'Open Multilaterals'

Countries participate in many multilateral organisations, for example the United Nations, World Bank or NATO. These organisations are (partially) funded via contributions from each member country. To fulfil their duties, these organisations buy services and products from companies all over the world. On this website we show which countries and companies reap the benefits of these transactions. We also publish the data we collected for free to be reused by others, see the data page.

Where did we get the data?

On the data page we link to the original sources and provide the data as CSV files. As you can see the original sources were often PDFs. This makes easy reuse of the data impossible so we had to retrieve it partially by hand using tools like Tabula. We describe our experience with each of the three multilateral organizations below:

Still, much of the information is incomplete as both the UN and NATO only publish awarded contracts costing more than a certain threshold (e.g. $30,000).

Why are Open Data from multilateral organisations important?

More and more countries are publishing information about their budgets, spending and procurement as society expects this information to be transparent. Multilateral organisations haven't been put up to much scrutiny in this aspect, but as they are government funded they should be transparent as well. This has several benefits. For example, the way we present the data on this website will stimulate countries and organizations to look at the share of contracts that are awarded to them and potentially act on that. But it can also be used by journalists and researchers to hold the multilateral organizations accountable. Besides opening up the awarded contracts for the 3 multilateral organizations on this website you can also check out our quickscan on the financial transparency of 24 multilateral organizations and read the accompanying article.

Who made this website?

This website was created by the Open State Foundation in cooperation with Hivos and Cordaid.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact us at contact@openstate.eu.