International Aid Transparency Initiative
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is an international organization that aims to make the financial flows in development cooperation more transparent and comparable. IATI pursues several sub-goals that are intended to increase the overall effectiveness of development cooperation and reduce global poverty. The sub-goals of IATI are:
- increase the accountability of the organizations involved,
- to improve cooperation between the various actors,
- to strengthen the predictability of the funds and
- Fight corruption.
Emergence
IATI was founded at the third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF3) on September 4th, 2008 in Accra . The High Level Forum is part of a series of international conferences organized by the OECD to increase the effectiveness of development cooperation and to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals . The conference was attended by representatives from donor countries, developing countries and civil society organizations.
At the second High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Paris in 2005, the importance of the transparency of financial flows was emphasized. In the run-up to the Accra conference, developing countries and civil society organizations such as PublishWhatYouFund and the BetterAid network in particular pushed for significant steps to increase the conference. The Accra Conference's final declaration, the Accra Action Plan, stressed the importance of transparency.
The organization was proposed by the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for International Development, Douglas Alexander , the Director of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Kemal Derviş , the Rwandan Finance Minister James Musconi and the President of Civicus Kumi Naidoo . The content of the initiative should be the creation of a common data standard for the donors. IATI has 14 founding members: UK , Netherlands , Sweden , Finland , Denmark , Germany , Ireland , Australia , New Zealand , the European Commission , World Bank , UNDP, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation .
Development of the initiative
After the initiative was founded, consultations organized by UNDP took place in different regions of the world to assess the information needs of governments and civil society. These consultations and votes among the donors led to the adoption of a common data standard on February 9, 2011 . At the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan (HLF4) in South Korea , IATI was further strengthened, including a. through the accession of the United States of America and through the agreement within the framework of the Busan Partnership declaration to publish a joint, open and machine-readable data standard by the end of 2015. In the run-up to HLF4, the first 19 donors published their data in the IATI standard. With the implementation of this declaration, at least 75 percent of the global official development aid will be available in the uniform IATI standard.
As of August 2013, 15 bilateral donors, 18 multilateral donors, 21 partner countries and 5 non-governmental organizations are members of IATI. 175 donors have already published data in the IATI register.
Content of the standard and IATI register
The IATI standard contains a list of information that international development cooperation funders should publish in a machine-readable format (XML). The data should be structured and published as open data under an open license . The information to be published includes some basic data on the donor organization (name, identification number, total budget) as well as basic data on all individual projects (name, project number, country, sector, total budget, etc.)
The data is published on the website of the respective donor and linked to the IATI register. The IATI register is therefore not a database, but rather a collection of links to encoder data. This data is freely available to everyone via search functions and data interfaces.
With the adoption of the Open Data Charter at the G8 meeting in 2013, all G8 countries also became members of IATI. At the World Summit for Humanitarian Aid in Istanbul in May 2016, other donors committed to a publication, so that in 2016 a number of 480 donors published data.
Added value to existing databases.
Before the IATI was implemented, there was primarily one source of data on international development cooperation: the OECD database, the Creditor Reporting System (CRS). The added value of IATI compared to the CRS affects several aspects.
Current data
The CRS is a database of statistically validated data reported by funders for past financial flows. Due to the intensive statistical validation, among other things, the data in the CRS is usually one to two years out of date. The IATI does not aim to publish statistically validated data, but rather to publish current and forward-looking "management data" that are largely correct.
Detailed data
The CRS provides little data on project activities such as the sector coding of a project to describe the project activities (e.g. primary education). In comparison, the IATI standard includes, for example, sub-national geographic data, contact information, information on delivery ties, links to project documents and individual financial transactions.
Comprehensive data
The CRS is an OECD database containing information on bilateral and multilateral organizations. With a few exceptions, there is no data on private donors such as foundations and non-governmental organizations . The IATI was initiated by bilateral and multilateral donors, but has been open to all financial flows of international development cooperation from the start. In 2013, more than 70 non-governmental organizations published their project data in the IATI standard. The IATI Secretariat has provided a detailed description of the differences between CRS and IATI.
use of data
The IATI provides raw data via the IATI register. The actors involved in the initiative assume that IATI itself is not able to process the data in such a way that all information needs can be met. Instead, all potential users are provided with the data in machine-readable form and with an open license so that they can create their own data applications. At the same time, however, some applications have already been developed by civil society and government organizations that can be used by all interested parties. Examples of these data applications based on IATI are: AKVO OpenAid, Aidview, Aiddata and FLOW.
organization
IATI is not an organization, but a network of government, multilateral, private and non-governmental organizations. In IATI, decisions are made by the steering committee . Bilateral and multilateral donors, non-governmental organizations and partner countries are represented in this body. The content-related development of the initiative is being promoted within the framework of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG), which usually meets once a year to provide the steering committee with input. The day-to-day administration, the organization of the steering committee and the TAG are the responsibility of the IATI Secretariat, which has been composed of a consortium of governmental, multilateral and non-governmental organizations since 2013. The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) is a member of the steering committee and the TAG. The Open Knowledge Foundation Germany is a member of the TAG.
Implementation in Germany
The federal government is one of the founding members of IATI and presented an initial implementation plan in December 2012. In March 2013, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) published the first data in the IATI standard. The plan is to publish data on all of German government development cooperation by 2015. In August 2013, no German non-governmental organization had implemented the standard.
Web links
- List of publishing states and organizations: https://www.iatiregistry.org/publisher
