evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice

InvestmentMap 2.0 — Dominican Republic's AI Chatbot for Public Investment Transparency

Dominican Republic · Santo Domingo · See the Dominican Republic profile

Dominican Republic's InvestmentMap 2.0 (December 2025) adds an AI chatbot to the national public investment system (SNIP), letting citizens query project data, budgets and progress in natural language. The IDB-backed tool reveals its reasoning steps for algorithmic transparency.

8+ additional Latin American and Caribbean countries
Planned regional replication

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development (Dominican Republic) / Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
Period
2025–present
Keywords
public finance, transparency, open government, citizen access, AI, chatbot

Context

InvestmentMap 2.0 was launched on 9 December 2025 — International Anti-Corruption Day — as a joint initiative of the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), extending the National Public Investment System (SNIP) with a natural-language AI chatbot.

Objectives

The tool aims to let any citizen query approved public-investment projects, budgets, disbursed amounts, physical progress and territorial distribution without registration, aggregating data across multiple ministries.

Activities

A key transparency feature displays the chatbot's internal reasoning steps, letting users inspect how the AI reached each answer — a design response to concerns about opaque AI in citizen-facing public services. The IDB designed InvestmentMap for multi-country replication and is extending the model to at least eight other Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Results

No operational utilisation metrics had been published as of June 2026, six months after launch.

Conclusions

InvestmentMap 2.0 is described as the first fully AI-chatbot-enabled public investment transparency tool in the Caribbean, and the Dominican Republic instance is among the earliest deployments of a design intended for regional replication; its evidence base currently rests on institutional credibility and design-layer transparency rather than measured usage outcomes.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k) — No public budget figures disclosed; estimated as medium given IDB-backed multi-ministry data integration and AI chatbot development intended for regional replication.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Launched 9 December 2025; still within its first year of operation with no post-launch performance data yet available.
Staffing & skills
Joint delivery by the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)

Conditions for success

  • Chatbot displays its own reasoning steps, directly addressing opacity concerns in citizen-facing public AI
  • No-registration public access lowers the barrier to citizen use
  • Aggregates data across multiple ministries into a single query interface
  • Designed from the outset for multi-country replication across Latin America and the Caribbean

Common failure modes

  • No operational usage or outcome data published as of six months post-launch

Where it fits

Governance type
national government in partnership with a multilateral development bank
Scale
national, with planned multi-country replication
Income level
upper-middle-income

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Similar practices you may find useful