TheInternational Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a global campaign to create transparency in the records of howaid money is spent. The initiative hopes to thereby ensure that aid money reaches its intended recipients. The ultimate goal is to improve standards of living worldwide and globally reduce poverty.[1] The IATI also publishes a standard to be used by organizations, allowing different datasets to be combined and shared.[2]
The initiative was launched on September 4, 2008, at theThird High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held inAccra, Ghana.[3]: 3 [4] The goal of the forum was to refocus attention worldwide on the steps needed to reach theUnited Nations'Millennium Development Goals. It was presented by the United Kingdom's Secretary of International DevelopmentDouglas Alexander; along withKemal Derviş, Head of theUnited Nations Development Programme;James Musconi, the Rwandan finance minister; andKumi Naidoo, then president ofCIVICUS.[5] Alexander recommended creating a common set of openness standards by which donors can be judged. 14 international donors pledged to expand transparency as a result, and an agreement was reached to develop a common format for the release of aid information by 2010.[6] A statement was issued by the signatories, which formally accepted the policies set forth in the Accra Agenda for Action[7] and agreed to form the IATI. The text of the statement suggests that aid donors should:[8]: 1
The statement was agreed to by a variety of international donors, including theMinistry for Foreign Affairs of Finland,Irish Aid, theWorld Bank, the UK'sDepartment for International Development, theUnited Nations Development Program, and theWilliam and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
After a period of widespread engagement of donors, governments, and NGOs and consultation on the information to be shared and how it should be shared, the IATI Standard was agreed on 9 February 2011 in Paris.[9]
At the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held inBusan,Korea in November 2011, the initiative received continued support. In the run up to the forum, over 19 donors, including 12 government and multilateral donors, and a number of small NGOs, started publishing information on their aid projects using the IATI Standard[1].
In October 2013, the IATI received a significant support when theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would join the initiative.[10]
Further support came from the workstream for greater transparency of theGrand Bargain (humanitarian reform) in 2016. In this workstream, aid organisations and donors committed to "publish timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data on humanitarian funding within two years of theWorld Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul" and participants in the workstream chose IATI as a common standard for that.[11]
On 8 June 2011,[12] the Make Aid Transparent Campaign[2] was launched, supported by over 60 organisations[3]Archived 2011-06-13 at theWayback Machine from North and South.
The IATI Standard[13] combines a list of the information that donors publishing data as part of the Initiative should seek to publish, along with anXML schema and collection of code lists for representing that information as structuredopen data. Donors publishing data using the standard are encouraged to submit meta-data to the IATI Registry, which lists the available data.
The IATI Standard succeeds two previous standardisation efforts for aid activity information: the Common Exchange Format for Development ActivitiesCEFDA (developed from 1991), and International Development Markup LanguageIDML (developed from 1998) and used byDevelopment Gateway as part of the data transfer standard in theAidData database.[14]
As of September 2024, the IATI Registry shows that 1690 organizations have published to the IATI standard.[15] As of December 2015[update], 47% ofEuropean Union aid flows are recorded on IATI.[16]
James Coe, a senior advocacy officer atPublish What You Fund, wrote in August 2016 that there are over 35,000 agriculture-related activities in the IATI Registry, but "only a small number provide the locations of activities and even fewer provide some form of data on the outcome", making the data difficult to use.[17]
A piece inDevex stated that while the number of organizations reporting to IATI has increased, "the biggest barrier to increased data usage remains concerns about quality" of the data.[18]
Efforts by IATI's Governing Board to address the data quality issues include the release of the "IATI Validator"[19] which enables publishers to confirm that their data is accessible and of good quality.