Methodology and sources

Scope and inclusion criteria

Africa Development Tracker records infrastructure and development projects across all 54 African countries. A record is included when it describes an identifiable asset, programme or financing operation in a specific country and at least one checkable source supports it.

The database is not a complete inventory. It cannot be used to compare national infrastructure output between countries.

What counts as a “tracked project”

Every record has a type: physical asset, programme, financing operation, phase, component or contract. Headline totals (“tracked projects”) count top-level records only. Phases, components, contracts and additional-financing operations linked to a parent are shown on the parent’s page but are not counted a second time.

A financing operation that has not yet been linked to an asset is counted, because we cannot yet prove it duplicates another record. Possible duplicates are flagged for review and never deleted automatically: a repeated title may be a separate loan, phase or component.

Coverage and known gaps

• Most records come from the World Bank Projects API, so countries where the World Bank lends more have more records.
• Projects financed by other lenders (China, AfDB, national budgets, public–private partnerships) are under-represented until editors add them.
• Start-of-works dates, physical progress and coordinates are often missing from financing sources and are then shown as “Not reported”.
• Historical records (before the 2000s) are less detailed.

Source priorities

• 1. Primary official documents: gazettes, parliamentary reports, ministries, implementing agencies, lenders’ completion reports.
• 2. Institutional databases: World Bank, AfDB, IMF, UN agencies, national statistical offices.
• 3. Reputable news reporting, only for dated facts and only where no primary source is available.
• Community contributions change a record only after an editor verifies them.

Status, progress and milestones

We distinguish physical completion, financial closure, cancellation and operational status. For a financing operation, “Financing closed” means the loan or grant has closed — not that the financed works are finished.

Progress is shown only when documented, with its basis (physical works, disbursement or milestones) and observation date. Unknown progress is stored as empty and displayed as “Not reported”; 0% is used only when a source states it.

The ambiguous “Year” field is replaced by explicit milestones: approval date, start of works, planned completion, actual completion, financial closing and operational date.

Costs, currencies and conversions

Approved budget, financing commitment, planned total cost, expenditure to date, amount disbursed and final cost are different measures. They are stored separately and never added together. Every amount keeps its original currency and date.

Where a US-dollar conversion is shown, we state the rate, its date and its source (by default the World Bank’s official annual-average exchange rate for the year of the amount). World Bank figures are published in US dollars and are not converted.

Political attribution

We record the administrations responsible for initiation, financing, construction and commissioning separately, each with its own evidence. We do not credit a whole project to a single administration, and a stage stays unattributed when evidence is missing.

Verification, review and corrections

• “Imported from source”: taken as-is from an institutional database; not yet checked by an editor.
• “Verified”: an editor checked the key fields against the cited sources on the date shown.
• “Flagged for review”: an automated check or a report found an inconsistency (impossible dates, invalid coordinates, missing units, contradictory status).
• “Disputed”: reliable sources disagree; the record explains the disagreement.

“Last verified” is separate from “Last edited”: fixing a typo does not make an old status look newly checked. Substantive corrections (status, dates, costs, classification, progress, attribution) are logged in each record’s correction history with the reason and evidence. Automated checks never change a record; they place it in a review queue.

Every record and every indicator has a “Report a correction” button.

Country profile data

Indicators come first from national statistical offices, official government sites, the World Bank, the IMF, UN agencies (UNDP, UNESCO) and other primary sources. Each value shows its source, reference period, type (actual, estimate, forecast, census) and verification date. Nominal GDP and GDP at purchasing power parity — and current versus constant prices — are always distinguished.

Leaders are published only after verification against an official government source, using the exact local title. Re-verification cadence: leadership and entry requirements every 30 days; practical information every 180 days; annual indicators every 400 days; geography every 5 years. Overdue items raise an editorial alert. “Not available” means no reliable value has been added.

Views counter

The counter, shown on the homepage and on country and project pages, shows qualified page views, not unique people. Language versions of a page share one total. A view is counted at most once per page per anonymous browser session within a 24-hour window, and only after the page has actually been displayed.

• Excluded: known crawlers and monitoring services, prefetches, signed-in admins and moderators, browsers sending Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, configured internal traffic, and rapid repeat requests.
• Personal data: a random session ID in a cookie scoped to the counter; only a salted hash of (session, page) is kept and it is deleted after two windows. No IP addresses are stored.
• Counting started on 1 November 2026. No historical totals have been reconstructed.
• Limitations: blockers, private browsing and unidentified bots can push the figures down or up.

Licences and attribution

World Bank project data: CC BY 4.0. World Bank indicators (WDI): CC BY 4.0. Time zones: IANA Time Zone Database. Currency codes: ISO 4217 list (SIX). Human Development Index: UNDP. World Heritage sites: UNESCO World Heritage List (identifiers compiled via Wikidata, CC0). Map tiles: © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO.