One question, answered only with published CEB and UNGM data:
What does the way the UN system is funded allow it to do?
The data, as published.
Large institutions generate large amounts of data. Most of it is published, by obligation, by statute, by the institutions themselves. Almost none of it is read, aggregated, or presented in a form that makes the patterns visible to anyone outside the institutions that generate it.
Flows exists to close that gap. I take public data, from international institutions, governments and statistical bodies, and do the work of making it legible: cleaning, aggregating, cross-referencing and visualising until the structural patterns become readable.
I hold no policy position. I do not advocate. I do not infer intent. I publish what the data shows, cite every source, document every limitation, and leave the interpretation to those who read it.
The name: carta blanca, a blank page. What you write on it is what the evidence allows.
The CEB and UNGM publish UN system financing in detail, but across many separate datasets that are rarely read together. Flows puts those public series side by side, so that funding quality, donor concentration and reporting gaps can be discussed on the same evidence.
Method in three lines. 1. Download the published CEB Financial Statistics, CEB HR Statistics and UNGM reports. 2. Compute every headline figure with one script into a single file, flows.json, that stores source, years, formula and limitation. 3. Publish only what the data supports, and show gaps as gaps. Full methodology.