The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a global campaign to create transparency in the records of how aid 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 the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held in Accra, Ghana. [3] : 3 [4] The goal of the forum was to refocus attention worldwide on the steps needed to reach the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. It was presented by the United Kingdom's Secretary of International Development Douglas Alexander; along with Kemal Derviş, Head of the United Nations Development Programme; James Musconi, the Rwandan finance minister; and Kumi Naidoo, then president of CIVICUS. [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 the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, Irish Aid, the World Bank, the UK's Department for International Development, the United Nations Development Program, and the William 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 in Busan, 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 .
In October 2013, the IATI received a significant support when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it would join the initiative. [10]
On 8 June 2011, [11] the Make Aid Transparent Campaign was launched, supported by over 60 organisations from North and South.
The IATI Standard [12] combines a list of the information that donors publishing data as part of the Initiative should seek to publish, along with an XML schema and collection of code lists for representing that information as structured open 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 Activities CEFDA (developed from 1991), and International Development Markup Language IDML (developed from 1998) and used by Development Gateway as part of the data transfer standard in the AidData database. [13]
As of August 2021, the IATI Registry tracks the aid information of over 1300 organizations. [14] As of December 2015 [update] , 47% of European Union aid flows are recorded on IATI. [15]
James Coe, a senior advocacy officer at Publish 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. [16]
A piece in Devex 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. [17]
A non-governmental organization (NGO) is an organization that generally is formed independent from government. They are typically nonprofit entities, and many of them are active in humanitarianism or the social sciences; they can also include clubs and associations that provide services to their members and others. NGOs can also be lobby groups for corporations, such as the World Economic Forum. NGOs are distinguished from international and intergovernmental organizations (IOs) in that the latter are more directly involved with sovereign states and their governments.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a United Nations agency tasked with helping countries eliminate poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth and human development. The UNDP emphasizes on developing local capacity towards long-term self-sufficiency and prosperity.
The Department for International Development (DFID) was a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom, from 1997 to 2020. It was responsible for administering foreign aid internationally.
TechSoup, founded in 1987 as CompuMentor and later known as TechSoup Global, is a nonprofit international network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provides technical support and technological tools to other nonprofits.
Development aid is a type of aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political development of developing countries. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid by aiming at a sustained improvement in the conditions in a developing country, rather than short-term relief. The overarching term is foreign aid. The amount of foreign aid is measured though official development assistance (ODA). This is a category used by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to measure foreign aid.
Aid effectiveness is the degree of success or failure of international aid. Concern with aid effectiveness might be at a high level of generality, or it might be more detailed.
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is a United Nations agency dedicated to implementing humanitarian and development projects for the United Nations System, international financial institutions, governments and other partners around the world, with a focus on infrastructure, procurement and project management The organization's global headquarters is located at the UN City campus in Copenhagen, Denmark. UNOPS delivers around $3 billion worth of development projects for its partners every year. Its activities have ranged from managing the construction of schools in Afghanistan, to building shelters in Haiti, to procuring ambulances to support the Ebola response in Liberia.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is a forum to discuss issues surrounding aid, development and poverty reduction in developing countries. It describes itself as being the "venue and voice" of the world's major donor countries.
CONCORD, also referred to as CONCORD Europe, is the European confederation of non-governmental organisations working on sustainable development and international development cooperation.
The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) is an independent, non-partisan and nonprofit international non-governmental organisation which works towards the practical realisation of human rights in the countries of the Commonwealth.
Devex is a social enterprise and media platform for the global development community. It aims to connect with and inform development, health, humanitarian, and sustainability professionals through news, business intelligence, funding and career opportunities related to international development. As an independent news organization, Devex employs more than 100 staff members in different locations, including Washington, D.C., where the organization is headquartered. It also maintains offices in Barcelona and Manila.
Publish What You Fund is a global campaign for aid transparency– more and better information about aid.
AidData is an Aid Transparency, Information Technology, and Geocoding institute formed on March 23, 2009. Its headquarters are in Williamsburg, Virginia. Its website provides access to development finance records from most official aid donors.
The International Development Markup Language (IDML) is an XML-based standard for the exchange of information on aid activities. It is used by a number of donors to provide information to the AidData database of development finance.
The Open Forum for CSO Development Effectiveness was the medium for a process led by civil society organizations (CSOs)between 2008 and 2012, to agree common principles and guidelines on CSO development effectiveness and bring the collective vision of organized people's groups into international development policy and practice.
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a combined term for the processes set up by organizations such as companies, government agencies, international organisations and NGOs, with the goal of improving their management of outputs, outcomes and impact. Monitoring includes the continuous assessment of programmes based on early detailed information on the progress or delay of the ongoing assessed activities. Evaluation involves the examination of the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and impact of activities in the light of specified objectives.
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA), two of five international organizations owned by the World Bank Group. It was established along with the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. After a slow start, its first loan was to France in 1947. In the 1970s, it focused on loans to developing world countries, shifting away from that mission in the 1980s. For the last 30 years, it has included NGOs and environmental groups in its loan portfolio. Its loan strategy is influenced by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, as well as environmental and social safeguards.
Synergy International Systems, Inc. (SIS) is an information technology and consulting company based in Washington, D.C. that provides web-based software to international development agencies, country governments, NGOs and private sector partners. Their key products are focused on monitoring and evaluation (M&E), national development effectiveness, aid management, judicial system modernization, social protection, public financial management, disaster relief and reconstruction, environment, education, and public health. There is a company-maintained global learning center in Yerevan, Armenia. The company's services include software development and customization, IT strategy consulting, systems integration, capacity development and technical support. Synergy has developed management information systems for public and private sector clients in 65 countries.
Humanitarian crowdfunding is an emerging, donation-based crowdfunding vertical recognized by the humanitarian community. It is classified as child category, nested under the generic term "charitable giving".
Four high level forums on aid effectiveness were held between 2003 and 2011 as part of a "continuous effort towards modernising, deepening and broadening development co-operation and the delivery of aid" coordinated through the OECD. They took place at Rome (2003), Paris (2005), Accra (2008) and Busan (2011).