IATI – the International Aid Transparency Initiative – brings together governments, multilateral institutions, private sector and civil society organisations, and others to increase the transparency and openness of resources flowing into developing countries.

Increased transparency is not an end in itself but an essential step towards improving the coordination, accountability, and effectiveness to maximise their impact on the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.

We encourage all organisations that distribute or spend resources to publish information about their activities using IATI’s data standard. This is a set of rules and guidelines to ensure information is easy to access, understand, and use.

IATI data helps meet the needs of a wide range of stakeholders in international development. For example:

  • Governments of developing countries need up-to-date information on which development and humanitarian organisations are operating in their country, so they can work with them effectively.
  • Donors and multilateral agencies need to understand where their spending will have the greatest impact.
  • Civil society organisations delivering services need to see what’s happening, and where, to improve coordination and avoid duplication of effort.
  • Citizens and journalists around the world need similar information to hold their governments to account on their spending and use of resources.

IATI wants to see transparent, good quality data used to achieve sustainable development.

Priorities as a partner of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data

IATI was launched at the Third High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra in 2008 and was designed to support donors in meeting their commitments on transparency and simultaneously serve the information needs of developing countries to enable the planning and management of national budgets based on more accurate and timely information on resource flows.

IATI brings together donors and recipients, civil society organizations, and other experts in the management of information on development cooperation. At the center of IATI is the IATI Standard, a format and framework for publishing data on development cooperation activities.

IATI supports organisations to publish a range of information about their spending and activities according to the IATI Standard. For example, organisations can publish details of their future budgets, the locations of their projects, or the results that have been achieved. IATI publishers include a broad range of organisations, from donor governments, development finance institutions and UN agencies to non-governmental organisations, foundations, and private sector organisations.

The number of IATI publishers is constantly growing and as of today, close to 900 organisations publish IATI data regularly (monthly, quarterly, yearly) and constantly generate large amounts of new data. The continuous steep increase of IATI publishers and data is a result of the outreach and advocacy work of the IATI community over the past several years.

With increasing numbers of publishers and volumes of data, IATI’s governing bodies took the decision to increase the focus on data use, and accordingly developed the IATI Data Use Strategy 2017 – 2019, which aims to continually improve data quality to respond to the needs of all stakeholders, facilitate access to executive tools and support to use this information for evidence-based policy making, transparency and accountability.

IATI data can be searched by anyone through a number of websites and analysed in different ways. The d-portal is the most commonly used platform for accessing IATI data. For more detailed searches – for example, by country, by sector or by organisation publishing data, the IATI Datastore CSV Query Builder can be used. IATI data can also be integrated directly into national aid management systems. We support people to use IATI by raising awareness, providing guidance, and technical tools required to use the data.