Annual Report 2020: IATI Strategic Plan in action

IATI has launched Annual Report 2020, showing significant progress in implementing the first year of its ambitious Strategic Plan 2020-25 whilst taking decisive action to support IATI publishers to share key information on their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Annual Report has a new vibrant, interactive format, and is accompanied by a separate Financial Report, developed to improve accessibility and transparency of information on IATI’s finances.

Download IATI Annual Report 2020 (FR / ES)

Download IATI Financial Report 2020 (FR / ES)

Responding to COVID-19: Open data in a global pandemic

2020 saw the COVID-19 pandemic drastically change the landscape in which international development and humanitarian organisations operate. At the onset of the pandemic, IATI recognised the urgent need for open data on the responses to the crisis by the international community. The initiative moved swiftly to enable the publication of data on COVID-19-related funding and activities, using the IATI Standard.

IATI data had been published on nearly 10,000 COVID-19-related activities by a wide range of development and humanitarian organisations, including donor governments, UN agencies and NGOs.

By the end of the year, IATI data had been published on nearly 10,000 COVID-19-related activities by a wide range of development and humanitarian organisations, including donor governments, UN agencies and NGOs. By accessing near real-time COVID-19 data, development and humanitarian actors have been better able to plan, coordinate and evaluate their responses to the pandemic.

Putting the Strategic Plan 2020-2025 into action

2020 marked the start of the implementation period for IATI’s ambitious five-year Strategic Plan, with wide-ranging actions undertaken to help achieve its objectives.

At the onset of the pandemic, IATI Secretariat staff moved to home-working and all planned in-person events were cancelled. Despite this, the initiative has made substantial progress against key targets agreed by IATI members.

• Analysis shows that there was significant progress in promoting the systematic use of IATI data by development and humanitarian actors. For example, three partner country governments (Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso) reported using IATI data in national budget planning processes, and to analyse total resource inflows.

• Demand for IATI data significantly increased, with visits to IATI’s search tool d-portal almost doubled and during the year five active tools accessed data via IATI’s new Datastore.

• In September 2020 IATI stepped up its effort to improve the quality of data published by launching the new Validator, which automatically identifies errors in data files. New guidance was also released on how to publish data on the results and conditions of funding.

• IATI held a comprehensive technical stocktake in June 2020 to provide clear, forward-looking recommendations to ensure the initiative’s technical infrastructure remains robust.

More data available

2020 marked another year of impressive growth in the volume of data available in IATI on international development and humanitarian financing and activities.

Data published on ways in which activities are contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) more than doubled since 2019.

• 152 organisations started to publish their data to IATI, representing a 14% increase since 2019.

• Organisations published data on a further 69,278 development and humanitarian activities.
  • 9,056 of these were identified as addressing humanitarian crises, increasing by 14% since 2019.

• Data published on ways in which activities are contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) more than doubled since 2019.

Strengthening the IATI Community

In 2020, IATI transformed its governance advisory structures to accommodate its expanding community of data publishers and users, transparency advocates, open data experts and technical specialists from across the globe. The initiative established a formal Working Group mechanism to respond to specific advisory needs, as well as Communities of Practice (COPs) to foster learning and networking across stakeholder groups. IATI Connect was launched in November providing a user-friendly digital engagement platform for the IATI Community, and registering almost 400 users by year end.

Looking ahead: Delivering the second year of IATI’s Strategic Plan

The initiative is well into delivering its ambitious workplan for the second year of implementation of IATI’s Strategic Plan 2020-2025. IATI Workplan 2021 sets out comprehensive actions to move the initiative closer to ensuring that transparent, good quality information on development cooperation and humanitarian assistance is available and used to help achieve sustainable development outcomes.