GHA 2018 reports progress in transparency of humanitarian financing

  • June 19, 2018

The Global Humanitarian Assistance 2018 (GHA 2018) report has recognised progress in transparency of humanitarian financing over the last year.

The report, published by IATI Secretariat member, Development Initiatives, provides the most comprehensive picture of international financing for addressing humanitarian crises.

This year’s report provides details of progress made by humanitarian donors and implementing organisations in publishing their spending and activities to IATI.

GHA 2018 specifically looks at the commitment made by signatories of the Grand Bargain agreement at the first World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, to publish “timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data” on their assistance.

By the end of 2017, 73% of Grand Bargain signatories were publishing open data to the IATI Standard, and 85% of these were publishing data on their humanitarian activities.

The GHA report emphasises that “greater transparency of the financing flows to humanitarian crises is important to enable coherent responses and to identify gaps”.

Since 2016, Development Initiatives has been working with the Grand Bargain transparency workstream co-conveners, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the World Bank Group, to support Grand Bargain signatories in implementing and monitoring their commitments to greater transparency. The latest information and statistics on the project can be found in Development Initiatives’ Progress report: Supporting Grand Bargain signatories in meeting commitments to greater transparency.

Full text of the GHA 2018 Transparency section:

Transparency Grand Bargain signatories committed to greater transparency and to publish “timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data” to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian response, as well as to enable greater accountability. And progress is being made. At the end of 2017 there were 56 Grand Bargain signatories.

  • The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard is a technical publishing framework allowing data to be compared across those agencies publishing and across time.
  • At the end of 2017, just under three-quarters (73%) of Grand Bargain signatories (or their members or affiliates) were publishing open data to the IATI Standard; of these, 85% were publishing data on their humanitarian activities. Meanwhile, 9% of Grand Bargain signatories were providing more granular humanitarian data, such as information on humanitarian response plans or clusters.
  • An updated version of IATI Standard (2.03) was developed in 2017, for launch in early 2018, and will enable organisations to publish data on specific Grand Bargain commitments, such as earmarking, CTP and if funding is channelled via local and national responders.
  • The UN OCHA Financial Tracking Service and IATI teams are working with the Centre for Humanitarian Data to pilot “the automated use of published IATI data as a primary data source for FTS”. This aims to reduce the reporting burden for participating organisations and enable faster data processing and analysis by FTS.
  • Developments in the FTS have been made to identify intermediaries in the financing chain and report on funding modalities (such as CTP) as well as on multi-year allocations.

Download GHA 2018 report

Download the full Global Humanitarian Assistance report and executive summary