Background

Before we begin, a few terms and concepts about IATI that are useful (though not essential) to understand as background:

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI – normally pronounced as a full word, ‘aye-at-ee’) is an initiative aimed at increasing aid transparency, which encourages organisations to put data about their aid activities online. Where they are spending their money, what they are spending their money on – the aim is to make it as easy as possible to ‘follow the money’.

Aid data is important because without it, it is very difficult for all parties involved in the sector to plan their work, to know whether it is being used as intended, and to know how effective it is. The overarching aim of IATI is stated as seeking to “improve transparency of aid, development, and humanitarian resources in order to increase their effectiveness in tackling poverty.”

There are so many groups working in this space: donor governments, big donor agencies like different UN groups, private donors like the Gates Foundation… the list goes on. Not having good quality, easy-to-access data on this topic makes things difficult for everyone involved. Donors can’t keep track of where their money is going, and those in aid-recipient countries can’t keep track of what should be happening as a result of development projects.

It’s run by a multi-stakeholder group in the Secretariat, but this sits within a wider governance structure, which organises itself as follows: (note, the TAG is the Technical Advisory Group.)

To find out more about the Technical Advisory Group, you can follow what they’re talking about over on their discussion group.

OK, so the diagram might seem a little confusing, but it’s not strictly essential to understand it. There are, however, two quick things to mention before we look at data sources.

Firstly — that they (the groups above!) have developed a common, open standard for the publication of aid data, which is called the IATI Standard.

Why is this important?

Before the IATI standard came along, all of those organisations were producing (and collecting) data in various different ways, which made it impossible to compare them, or use them together. Now, the data is what we call ‘interoperable’, as it can be combined with other data sets, and used together to discover patterns, to see for example if lots of organisations are working on the same area, in the same region, or not.

The standard is regularly updated, and the latest update to version 2.01 was accepted formally by the Steering Committee in October 2014. If you’re interested in knowing more about the standard itself, go to the IATI Standard website, http://iatistandard.org/.

The version of the Standard doesn’t, or shouldn’t, affect too much how you use the data – but if you see various mentions of the IATI Standard popping up, this is what they are referring to.

More importantly though, they also manage the IATI Data Registry, which is where you can find links to all published IATI datasets. The datasets are usually hosted directly by the publishing organisation, but you can also find these links on other sites, which is what we’ll look at now: