EPJ Data Sci. (2018) 7: 12
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0141-0

Regular article

Mapping the international health aid community using web data

¹ Naxys Department of Mathematics, University of Namur, Namur, Belgium
² Center for International Development, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
³ Independent Evaluation Group, World Bank, Washington, USA

^* e-mail: michele_coscia@hks.harvard.edu

Received: 31 October 2017
Accepted: 30 April 2018
Published online: 8 May 2018

Abstract

International aid is a complex system: it involves different issues, countries, and donors. In this paper, we use web crawling to collect information about the activities of international aid organizations on different health-related topics and network analysis to depict this complex system of relationships among organizations. By systematically collecting co-occurrences of issues, countries, and organization names from more than a hundred websites, we are able to construct multilayer networks describing, for instance, which issues are related to each other according to which organizations. Our results show that there is a surprising amount of homophily among organizations: organizations of the same type (multilateral, bilateral, private donors, etc.) tend to be co-cited in groups. We also create a taxonomy of issues that are generally mentioned together. Finally, we perform simulations, showing that messages originating from different organizations in the international aid community can have a different reach.