aidinfo open their data

We’re happy to announce that Development Initiatives Poverty Research is now publishing data about the aidinfo programme and how we spend our money. We are making the information available in an internationally agreed, open, common format which will allow people to compare and combine it with other information.

The common format was developed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Our data will sit alongside other organisations and donor’s data who have signed up to IATI.

We’ve been working hard on this release and we believe that this move towards greater openness and transparency around our project is important. As advocates for more and better aid information, it was important that we were one of the first organisations to publish and use the IATI standard.

What you can find

We are initially publishing data which covers work funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. With plans to develop and broaden the coverage of the data we are publishing over the next few months, the initial publication includes titles and descriptions of project activities, budgets, transactions aggregated by quarter, start and end dates and activity regions or countries. For further information, please see our implementation schedule.

You can access our raw data by visiting aidinfo.org/open or explore it using the IATI data explorer.

Shared learning

As the first NGO to publish data in an IATI compliant format, we found some barriers of interpreting the standard in a way which enabled us to effectively explain the way that our organisation operates. These lessons will be pulled together and shared with other NGOs involved in the process themselves.

Furthermore, as a small organisation, we don’t have a project-management system which enables us to pull together data easily. This means that the data-gathering process we went through was manual, pulling together data from various different sources, including budgets, reports, financial systems and spreadsheets of project information.

The process of publishing IATI data has encouraged us to reconsider the way we record and store project information internally, in order to make it easier to access both internally and externally.

What is IATI?

The IATI Standard was agreed in February 2011. The two year consultation process involved international donors, civil society organisations and representatives from developing countries.

IATI seeks to improve the accessibility, quality, detail and timeliness of information on aid flows. It does this by defining specific items of data that should be published, an agreed set of definitions and an agreed machine-readable format that enables data from different organisations to be easily compared.

IATI is standard that can be adopted for all development actors, although it has initially been implemented by larger donors such as the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the World Bank and The Hewlett Foundation.

The IATI standard allows people to trace the funding from the original source (the Hewlett Foundation) to the activities that aidinfo is implementing using the resources. ‘Traceability’ is a key benefit of publishing information in the IATI standard  as it supports greater accountability of aid resources. If more donors and their implementing partners (Governments and Civil Society Organisations) publish to IATI then people in developing countries will be better able to track resources coming into the country for development and monitor whether the activities that they link to on the ground are actually being implemented.

We plan to share further knowledge and experience on this process as it develops, keep an eye out here for upcoming progress reports in the next few weeks.

If you’d like to publish your organisation’s data to IATI, or you’ve got any questions about our data and how we did this then please get in touch.

For more information on how we’re publishing, what we’re publishing now and what we’ll publish in the future please visit our aidinfo/open page.