Every year, millions of people are displaced by large-scale development projects—dams, pipelines, plantations—that are often negotiated behind closed doors, far from the communities they affect. For those trying to protect these communities, tracing the financial chains behind a harmful project—identifying who profits from it and who has the power to stop financing it—can transform a seemingly untouchable developer into a node in a web of actors, each a potential pressure point for advocacy.

Inclusive Development International has spent years building the resources to make that possible. Their “Following the Money to Justice” Initiative collects practical guides, case studies, and a growing suite of tools to help advocates to map investment chains and identify those pressure points. Inclusive Development International has been collaborating with the Data Science Institute since 2021 to build data tools to put investigative tools in the hands of communities.

The Development Bank Investment Tracker, known as DeBIT, was launched in May 2022 through a collaboration between the DSI and IDI, with funding from the 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation. The database tracks approximately 100,000 projects financed by 16 development banks with accountability mechanisms, scraping and refreshing data directly from the institutions’ websites twice per month. Community advocates use DeBIT to hold development finance institutions accountable for displacement or pollution, journalists use it to cover development and environmental issues, and watchdog organizations monitor projects for corruption—providing critical information for communities seeking recourse.

The Shareholder Tracker, deployed in February 2025, extends that reach into corporate investment. The database compiles public disclosures from more than 4,200 investors, allowing users to search the shareholders of thousands of publicly traded companies by name, sector, country, or security identifier. Together, the two tools allow advocates to trace which companies are sourcing from harmful development projects—and who’s investing in those companies—to form a fuller picture of financial accountability. 

“Corporations and financial institutions use sophisticated, often subscription-only, tools to track investments and assess risks,” said Dustin Roasa, IDI’s research director. “But communities impacted by those investments and advocates working to hold these institutions accountable are forced to do this research manually by scrolling through PDFs, copying data into spreadsheets, and spending their already limited time and resources tracing each individual financial connection. Often, it is prohibitively time consuming to get a complete picture this way. DeBIT and the Shareholder Tracker help level the playing field. They allow us—and our community partners and the advocates we train—to quickly and more precisely pierce the corporate veil.”

Over the past year, the Data Science Institute partnered with IDI to continue working on these tools to give them significant upgrades.

For DeBIT, the upgrades focused on sustainability and reliability. The DSI team made the tool more resilient to website changes, expanded the data available to users, and improved currency conversion handling. They also simplified the architecture and reduced monthly costs dramatically, making the tool more sustainable for long-term use.

For the Shareholder Tracker, the team focused on incorporating new data sources that were a priority for IDI,  cleaning and standardizing data from over a dozen pension funds. “We really try to listen to IDI as the domain experts,” said Launa Greer, Software Engineer II at the DSI. “Dustin explains what IDI’s researchers are trying to help communities do, as well as major sources–and we build our scoping and development process search around that, iterating on the project in stages to make sure we’re in alignment with his vision.” The DSI partnered with students at Warren Wilson College to help incorporate these sources, reviewing students’ code and providing advice on how to structure software engineering and data science projects for extendability and reproducibility. Other updates included enabling downloads and creating mobile-friendly views. 

“Historically, when development causes these harms—displacement, environmental effects, deforestation, pollution, violence—the affected populations haven’t had much recourse,” said Greer. “So collecting the information scattered across the web into something they can use to guide whom they approach is really powerful. Being able to use tech to do that is part of what really drove me into a career in social impact.”

Upcoming Webinar

On March 10 at 10 a.m. ET, IDI and the DSI will host a public webinar demoing both tools using real-world case studies. Attendees can try out the tools themselves and ask the team for strategies on how to effectively trace financial chains and identify leverage points for advocacy. Registration for the event is open to the public. Interested individuals can register at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wPMrefb6R960fYaBczLfew.

About the Partnership

The collaboration with IDI is part of the DSI’s Community-Centered Data Science program, which partners academic researchers and technical staff with nonprofit organizations to address real-world social challenges. Since 2021, the partnership has produced multiple tools that make corporate accountability data accessible to communities and advocates, including DeBIT (2022) and the Shareholder Tracker (2025) as well as PalmWatch (2024), which tracks palm oil supply chains and deforestation. All share a common approach: collect and standardize scattered data and make it easy to search, visualize, and use. This partnership is made possible by support from  the 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation.

Looking Ahead

The recent upgrades to DeBIT and the Shareholder Tracker are part of a broader effort to democratize access to financial data. Important information about corporate ownership, development finance, and investment flows currently exists only in paid subscription services like Bloomberg Terminal and LSEG Workspace, making it prohibitively expensive for most advocacy organizations. IDI and the DSI are working to change that by building open-access tools that put this information in the hands of community advocates and public interest researchers. Next up: a Commercial Debt Tracker, which will allow users to track commercial bank loans and bond underwriting, helping advocates to quickly identify private-sector financial institutions exposed to harmful projects.

For practical guidance on how to hold corporations accountable—how to research hidden investors, collect evidence, tailor an advocacy strategy to identify the most effective “pressure points,” and defend affected communities—visit https://www.followingthemoney.org/.