The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has announced a $1 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support AidData, a search engine and Web portal that enables users to track the flow of development funding around the world.

Created in December as a result of a merger between William & Mary's Project-Level Aid effort and nonprofit organization Development Gateway's Accessible Information on Development Activities project, AidData provides development practitioners, researchers, government officials, and individuals interested in development finance with access to comprehensive, high-quality information on aid activities worldwide. Coordinated by the college's Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations in collaboration with Brigham Young University and Development Gateway, AidData nearly doubles the amount of development finance previously tracked by a single source and makes available nearly one million individual foreign aid transactions. A beta version of AidData was launched to the public in March.

The grant will support the second phase of AidData's five-year growth campaign, during which AidData researchers will work to expand the project's database to include previously unpublished data from both traditional and new donors, add project documents and geo-location codes to aid projects, and continue cutting edge research on aid allocation and aid effectiveness. Through these efforts, AidData researchers hope to increase the effectiveness and transparency of foreign aid programs by providing easy access to aid information through a shared online source.

"We have been extremely fortunate that the Hewlett Foundation has seen fit to support this project so generously," said Michael Tierney, director of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations. "This grant will not only help to make development finance more transparent and effective, it will also enable internationally oriented student-faculty research on a range of policy relevant issues."