DIPR become fourth organisation to publish IATI data

Today, Development Initiatives Poverty Research (DIPR) has become the first NGO to publish their data in an IATI compliant format.

DIPR has been involved with the International Aid Transparency Initiative since its launch in 2008 at the Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, and has since been working as part of the IATI Secretariat and managing the Technical Advisory Group Secretariat.

By publishing data on the Hewlett Foundation funded aidinfo programme, DIPR have shown their commitment to increasing the transparency of aid flows, and opened up operational data on their projects.

They are publishing their data at www.aidinfo.org/open and have registered it on the IATI registry. Their initial publication only covers activities funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, but they intend to provide further data on other projects and funding streams later in the year and into the second quarter of 2012. In September, with the second release of data, they hope to produce further information including activity documents, and more disaggregated transaction information.

DIPR have published an implementation schedule including more detail on dates for later publications of their data. The table below indicates the data items that they are publishing initially and those items that they will not be publishing until a later date.

DIPR are publishing their data for several reasons:

• Practising what they preach – accessibility, useability and openness of data is central to the beliefs and work of the organisation.
• Traceability – the aidinfo programme at DIPR sees traceability of aid through the delivery chain as a value that can be added by organisations publishing data to the common IATI standard. Since both of their funders, the Hewlett Foundation and the UK Department for International Development are both already reporting, they hope to build a proof of concept on traceability.
• Improving their work – DIPR host the IATI Technical Advisory Group Secretariat, part of whose role is to support organisations implementing. By publishing IATI data themselves, they are able to learn more about the process and use this knowledge to work with other organisations.

To enable people to access the raw data in a more user-friendly format, DIPR have also been working developers to create the IATI activity viewer, which enables users to view the raw data in a more accessible format.

As the first NGO to publish IATI compliant data, DIPR are keen to share their experiences of publishing and implementation with other similar organisations. They will be publishing blogs on the process and also producing a methodology paper to share with other NGOs and CSOs.  If you would like any further information on their publication, please visit www.aidinfo.org/open or email them at [email protected] .