WASHINGTON — The Inter-American Development Bank is the first multilateral development bank to publicly share the computer code products it develops for clients in an open-source repository, an effort that has seen downloads from nearly every country in the world since it launched two years ago.
IDB’s Code for Development initiative has made available code other governments and organizations can download and repurpose for free from Github, a hosting site for computer code. This saves bank clients and other governments money that was previously being spent designing, developing, and licensing new code to solve similar development problems in sectors from health to governance in different countries and municipalities around the world.
The initiative is part of an IDB effort over the last 10 years to make the knowledge generated by the bank available for clients and others seeking to solve development challenges. Already, Code for Development has proven there is an appetite for this sort of free resource, according to Kyle Strand, an IDB senior knowledge management specialist.