Canada launch open data portal

Canada became latest donor to improve access to aid information with the launch of CIDA’s open data portal a couple of weeks ago. This is a welcome move, and one that marks a partial victory for campaigners in Canada who have consistently lobbied their government to increase the transparency of its aid. Via the portal, CIDA are publishing 12 simple data fields including project numbers, titles, dates and descriptions, with the helpful ability to record multiple sector and country codes.

But in order to maximise the usefulness of this data, and to meet in full the demands of campaigners like Engineers Without Borders, we urge Canada to go the extra mile and publish its data to the IATI standard. It would be easy to convert the data published via the CIDA portal into IATI format, and although there would be some gaps – such as data on disbursements and activity (project/programme) budgets – simply converting CIDA’s existing data into the IATI format would be a good first step towards becoming fully IATI-compliant.