Methodology

Every number here traces to a source.

HEF publishes 35 sourced records across projects, trackers, briefs and whitepapers. Every one of them carries a named source, a date, and a stated confidence tier. This page explains what those mean, so you can judge the weight of any figure on this site rather than taking it on trust.

Confidence tiers

Not everything we publish is known to the same standard. Rather than flatten that into a single confident voice, each figure is labelled with the tier it actually earns.

Verified: Traced to a primary source and checked by HEF against the original document.
Reported: Published by a named third-party source and not independently confirmed by HEF.
Estimate: Modeled or derived by HEF from published inputs. Not an observed value.

A tier is never applied in bulk. Moving a record to Verified requires someone at HEF to read the primary document and attach their name to it.

What every record carries

Named sources. The publication or institution the figure came from, linked to the original document wherever we hold the link.
Data as of. The date the underlying data describes — not the date we happened to publish it.
Last verified, and by whom. When a person last confirmed the record still reflects its sources. Records not re-checked within 120 days are flagged Refresh pending on the page itself.
Methodology, for anything modeled. An estimate cannot be published without an explanation of how it was derived.

These are not editorial conventions — they are enforced in the codebase. A record missing any of them fails the build and cannot be deployed. Where a figure is unavailable, the element is omitted rather than filled with a placeholder.

Projections versus observations

Tracker charts distinguish measured history from modeled forecast: observed values are drawn as a solid line, projections as a dashed one. Headline figures always quote the last observed value — a forecast never becomes the number at the top of the page. Data exports carry the same distinction in an explicit column.

Corrections

If you believe something here is wrong, we want to know. Being correctable is not a weakness in a research platform — it is the part that makes the rest credible.

Tell us which page, which figure, and what the correct value should be, with a source if you have one. Substantive corrections are made against the record, with the verification date updated so the change is visible.

Submit a correction

Scope and limits

The project directory is a record of publicly reported infrastructure, compiled from government releases, multilateral lender disclosures, and regional press. It is not field research: HEF has not independently inspected these projects, and entries reflect what the cited sources report. Tracker values are aggregations and models built on those same public inputs, with their derivation stated on each tracker page.