How is an 'activity' defined?

In IATI, an activity refers to any piece of development or humanitarian work that your organisation undertakes.

As the reporting organisation, you have the flexibility to define what an activity is for your work.

An activity:

  • represents a specific piece of your development or humanitarian work
  • can vary in size and scope
  • could be a large regional programme, a smaller local project, or work tied to a specific grant

For each activity, you must report its location, sector, and financial information. You can also publish the activity's title and description in multiple languages. It's recommended to publish in your own language and, if possible, the languages of the recipient countries or regions.

All of this information should be compiled into an Activity File. More detail on what to include in this file is available in key information to publish and optional information you can publish.

If a donor requires you to publish IATI data, they may have specific guidelines on how to define your activities. You can find more information in the Donors' reporting requirements section.

Related guidance

Key activity information to publish

IATI calls each piece of work done by your organisation an ‘activity’. Each activity can be described through ‘elements’ that record different details about it. We recommend you start by publishing the elements listed here.

IATI calls each piece of work done…

All the activity information you can publish

As an IATI publisher you should increase the quality of your data over time, adding in more elements to better describe your work. This page gives the full list of top-level elements you can include.

As an IATI publisher you should in…

Creating IATI activity identifiers

Each activity published to IATI has a unique identifier. This allows other organisations to find your activity and reference it if needed.

Each activity published to IATI ha…