U.S. Government (USAID, State and Other Agencies) · Foreign Aid Spending to Sub-Saharan Africa, Last 12 Months (IATI) · US$ billions

## What this measures

The part of the U.S. government's monthly foreign aid spending (as reported to IATI; see oda.iati.disbursements_usd.usa) that went to Sub-Saharan Africa. Each point is the sum of the twelve months (four quarters) to that date.

Every U.S. transaction names its own recipient country or region, so each counts in full or not at all.

## Why it matters

The OECD publishes each year's official aid figures in April of the next year and its recipient tables a year after that. IATI is where publishers report spending as it happens, so it shows month by month who cut, who did not, and where the money stopped arriving, well before the OECD tables.

## How to read it

Spending through global programmes and multilateral funds that serve Africa without naming a country (U.S. payments to the Global Fund, for example) is not counted here.

IATI data arrive as publishers report, and recent months fill in late. The IATI Datastore keeps no earlier versions, so Palanor measures each publisher's lag from IATI-Stats' daily record (January 2024 to October 2025) of how far its newest transaction trailed each day's read, and uses the 90th percentile, capped at 90 days: 52 days for USAID. A month is published only once its end is that many days past and the publisher has reported it, and the six newest published months are flagged preliminary. Each point keeps the value Palanor first read and the date it read it, so later revisions can be measured.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the OECD DAC's "South of Sahara" group: its countries plus the regional codes for South of Sahara and its eastern, middle, southern and western parts. A transaction that names its own recipient counts in full or not at all. Otherwise the activity's recipient countries and regions split it by their stated percentages, or equally when no percentages are given. "Africa, regional" projects are not counted, as in the OECD's own South of Sahara figures.

## What it does not say

Coverage: the IATI total was 82.6% of the U.S. ODA figure in OECD DAC1 (grant equivalent) in 2023 and 81.3% in 2024, and 89.3% and 90.1% of U.S. ODA gross disbursements in the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS). IATI counts cash paid in the year; DAC1 counts the grant-equivalent ODA the U.S. reports, which also includes items the agencies do not publish to IATI. A month's figure is cash reported as paid out in that month, not what was budgeted or committed, and it says nothing about what the money achieved. Values are in each transaction's own currency, valued at its value date. Euro and pound values are converted at the Federal Reserve's monthly average rate for the value-date month (FRED EXUSEU, EXUSUK); a value date outside the window read, or after the latest monthly rate, takes the transaction month's or the latest rate.

## Source

IATI Datastore (api.iatistandard.org/datastore), transactions of type 3 (disbursement) and 4 (expenditure), read weekly by /api/cron/iati-spending-sync (src/lib/iati/spending.ts). U.S. agencies publish to IATI under CC0 (public domain); the Millennium Challenge Corporation marks its data public domain. Data © their publishers, used under the licences in their IATI Registry entries.