Temporal patterns in aid disbursement across five East African countries
Aid doesn’t flow in a steady stream. Analysis of disbursement transactions across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia reveals a fiscal year-end surge that concentrates nearly a quarter of World Bank disbursements into a single month, and an institution-dependent delivery timeline that ranges from 3 days to 8 months.
June accounts for 20.1% of all disbursements — 2.4 times the expected share if money flowed evenly through the year. This pattern is almost entirely driven by the World Bank, whose fiscal year runs July–June. Remove the World Bank from the data, and the June spike disappears: non-World Bank disbursements are exactly 8.3% in June, right at the expected share.
| Month | World Bank | Others |
|---|---|---|
| Jan | 4.3% | 5.4% |
| Feb | 5.7% | 7.0% |
| Mar | 9.4% | 8.2% |
| Apr | 7.9% | 6.8% |
| May | 8.1% | 6.0% |
| Jun | 23.9% | 8.3% |
| Jul | 6.6% | 9.6% |
| Aug | 4.4% | 8.2% |
| Sep | 5.9% | 7.6% |
| Oct | 5.2% | 9.8% |
| Nov | 6.3% | 10.6% |
| Dec | 12.4% | 12.5% |
The fiscal year-end spending surge is well-documented in domestic government budgets. What’s distinctive here is that it operates across borders: the World Bank’s internal fiscal calendar directly shapes the cash flow of recipient countries that had no role in setting it.
December is also elevated for both groups (12.4% and 12.5%), consistent with calendar-year-end processing from bilateral donors and other multilaterals. But December’s bump is modest — 50% above expected — compared to the World Bank’s June surge at nearly 3× expected.
The June spike varies substantially by country, likely reflecting the World Bank’s share of each country’s portfolio.
| Country | June | December | Peak deviation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kenya | 34.2% | 8.1% | +25.9 pp |
| Tanzania | 18.1% | 14.7% | +9.8 pp |
| Uganda | 15.9% | 9.3% | +7.6 pp |
| Ethiopia | 15.7% | 12.7% | +7.4 pp |
| Rwanda | 11.4% | 20.1% | +11.8 pp (Dec) |
Kenya shows the most extreme June concentration: 34.2% of all disbursements in a single month. Rwanda is the outlier — its peak is December rather than June, suggesting its aid portfolio is more weighted toward calendar-year-cycle organizations.
How long does it take for committed funds to begin flowing? The answer depends almost entirely on the institution.
| Organization | Median delay | Mean delay | Activities | Commitments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Fund | 3 days | 16 days | 114 | $9.8B |
| Gates Foundation | 6 days | 193 days | 51 | $0.4B |
| Gavi | 182 days | 210 days | 56 | $2.8B |
| World Bank | 243 days | 263 days | 282 | $72.2B |
The Global Fund disburses within days of commitment — its performance-based model pre-negotiates implementation arrangements. The World Bank’s 8-month median reflects procurement, safeguard compliance, and disbursement conditions. These aren’t broken promises — they’re different institutional architectures operating at different speeds.
The Gates Foundation shows a revealing split: its median (6 days) and mean (193 days) are far apart. Most grants disburse quickly, but a subset involves longer institutional pathways.
For organizations that report both commitments and disbursements to IATI, aid is actually quite predictable at the activity level:
The 12–14% of activities that are substantially under-disbursed (D/C < 0.5) are almost entirely large World Bank infrastructure projects mid-implementation — multi-year programs where disbursement is expected to continue, not broken promises. Only 3–7% of activities have a commitment with zero corresponding disbursement, and these are typically recent commitments from 2025–2026.
This is a more encouraging picture than the “broken promises” narrative often applied to development commitments. But the caveat is substantial: this only captures organizations that report both transaction types to IATI. The largest bilateral donors are underrepresented in this sample.
For recipient country budgets: If the World Bank accounts for a large share of development funding, the government must plan for a June cash surge followed by lean months. Budget execution must accommodate this rhythm rather than the steady monthly assumption in many national budgets.
For development effectiveness: Activities competing for the same implementation capacity — contractors, consultants, government staff — face a simultaneous crunch in June, potentially creating bottlenecks.
For aggregate statistics: Annual disbursement figures hide these within-year patterns entirely. Two countries receiving the same annual volume face very different realities if one receives it in a June spike and the other in steady flows.
Data drawn from the Code for IATI Datastore (transaction-level CSV) for Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. 75,000 transactions analyzed (15,000 per country), covering all transaction types. Seasonal analysis uses disbursement transactions (type 3) with valid dates from 2010–2025. Commitment-to-disbursement timing uses activities with both commitment (type 2) and disbursement (type 3) transactions. The analysis is biased toward organizations with structured IATI reporting: multilateral development banks, global health funds, and a subset of bilateral donors.