Developing countries face huge challenges in accessing up-to-date information about aid, development, and humanitarian flows – information that they need to plan and manage those resources effectively. Similarly, citizens in developing countries and in donor countries lack the information they need to hold their governments accountable for the use of those resources. IATI aims to address these challenges by making information about aid spending easier to access, use, and understand.

IATI is a voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiative that seeks to improve the transparency of aid, development, and humanitarian resources in order to increase their effectiveness in tackling poverty. IATI brings together donor and recipient countries, civil society organisations, and other experts in aid information who are committed to working together to increase the transparency and openness of aid.

At the centre of IATI is the IATI Standard, a format and framework for publishing data on development cooperation activities, intended to be used by all organisations in development, including government donors, private sector organisations, and national and international NGOs. It was designed in close consultation with key users of development cooperation data in developing countries, to ensure its relevance and utility for a variety of different data users.

Organisations implement IATI by publishing their aid information in IATI’s agreed electronic format (XML) – usually on their website – before linking it to the IATI Registry. The Registry acts as an online catalogue and index of links to all of the raw data published to the IATI Standard.

History

IATI was launched in 2008 at the third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra. It was designed, in part, to support donors to meet their political commitments on transparency, as laid out in the Accra Agenda for Action.

At the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, 2011, development actors committed to “implement a common open standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on resources provided through development cooperation,” that takes into account the statistical reporting of the OECD-DAC and work of IATI.

IATI comprises one part of the Common Standard, alongside the DAC Creditor Reporting System and Forward Spending Survey – both statistical reporting systems from the OECD. The purpose of the Common Standard is to improve the availability of historic, current, and future resource flows, to foster more accurate detail in reporting data provided by a broader range of cooperation providers, and to encourage data reporting in a more timely fashion.

Endorsers of the Busan Outcome Document committed to publishing to the Common Standard by the end of 2015.