Excluding data from publication

You may be unable or unwilling to publish certain information to comply with a contract, policy or regulation, or to protect staff working in a sensitive area.

For each case you should decide what information about an activity is ok to publish, and which details need to be excluded. These might include location, sector or financial information. In some cases, an entire activity may have to be left out.

It is useful for users of your data to know what might be missing from your IATI files, so you should outline this in a public exclusion policy.

Why exclude data

While your default position should always be to publish as much as you can, there may be cases where you have to exclude data temporarily or indefinitely.

Examples of why you might need to exclude data include the following:

• your activities are considered illegal or otherwise unacceptable by states or societies in your field, for example in human rights, gender or governance activities
• you’re working in sensitive geographical areas and it presents a risk to your organisation or staff to publish the exact location of your work
• you need to protect commercial information
• your grant contract restricts which details you can make public.

Creating an exclusion policy

If you're excluding data from your IATI records, you must publish an exclusion policy. This should explain how you decide what data to exclude, including the criteria and process you follow.

You should link your exclusion policy to your IATI publisher account by putting its URL in the 'Description' field in the IATI Registry. Under ‘Field exclusions’ in the IATI Registry, you should provide information about the IATI Standard elements that you can’t use and why.

When developing a policy on exclusions, consider:

• Does your organisation have an existing freedom of information policy (or similar) that could stop information being published?
• Is it subject to any laws that may limit your IATI publishing?
• Does your organisation have any contracts that stop you from publishing information?
• For information you can’t publish, do you know which IATI data elements need to be excluded?
• How will you decide if entire activities need to be excluded?

If you receive funding from the UK, Danish, Dutch or Belgian governments, please see Donors' reporting requirements for their guidance on exclusion policies.

For an example of a non-government organisation’s exclusion policy see:

• Oxfam GB’s Open Information Policy
• United Nations Development Programme's Information Disclosure Policy (and see section IV confirming the exclusions for UNDP)