Report by Luca Picci and Jorge Rivera: “The development community is driving down a winding road while looking in the rearview mirror. Official statistics tell us where official development assistance (ODA) stood a year ago, with precision and authority. But they don’t tell us the road has turned until after the fact.
That’s a problem. It means that programme decisions, policy responses, and advocacy strategies are being made on the basis of incomplete or outdated data. In 2025, the four largest Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors—the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France—all cut ODA. Initial projections estimated that ODA would fall by between 9% and 17% in 2025 [1]; preliminary ODA figures published in April 2026 suggest that ODA fell by 23.1% [2]. Official detailed data for the 2025 cuts, disaggregated by donor, sector, and recipient, will not be available until December 2026, however, and detailed data on 2026 ODA will not be available until late 2027.
Nowcasting methods have been developed to address this problem. They estimate the current value of a lagged official statistic using data published at a higher frequency, updating estimates as new information arrives, and quantifying uncertainty. Nowcasting provides a blurred view through the windshield; still not a clear picture of the road, but enough to spot the turn.
This paper reviews the ODA data landscape and existing nowcasting approaches, and assesses which merit further investigation in the context of ODA. Our conclusion is that a nowcasting system for ODA is within methodological reach. Such a system could produce estimates that get updated as new information arrives, ahead of official data publication. Initially, this system would estimate ODA at the donor level for major DAC donors, with finer disaggregation contingent on what the available data can support…(More)”.
