Groundbreaking progress made in 2016

2016 has been another successful year for IATI. We’ve made groundbreaking progress on securing political commitments from the humanitarian and development community and seen a huge increase in IATI publishers. Here are IATI’s 2016 highlights:

500 IATI publishers reached

500 organisations are now publishing their development activities to IATI. As a result, data on billions of dollars of development spending is now available, open and free from donor governments, multilateral agencies, foundations, NGOs and private sector organisations. This tremendous effort from the international development community is one that we can all be proud of.

Groundbreaking commitments made to IATI

At the World Humanitarian Summit in May, global actors signed up to a ‘Grand Bargain’ and committed to publishing their humanitarian financing to IATI within two years. Last month, a renewed commitment to IATI was included in the Nairobi Outcome Document at the 2nd High Level Meeting for the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation (HLM2). The document endorsed IATI as an open data standard that development actors can rely on and emphasised the need for an increase in data use.

New IATI members joined

This year IATI welcomed important new members from across the development and open data sector. These include the governments of France and South Korea, UNIDO, UNEP, UNFAO, the World Health Organization, Synergy and Zimmerman and Zimmerman.

Steady improvements in data quality

Thanks to the efforts of IATI’s members and its global technical community, we have seen steady improvements in the quality of IATI data, making their information more useful.

In May, IATI’s Technical Team took another step forward in improving data quality by adding coverage statistics on the IATI Dashboard for all IATI publishers. Now publishers can easily see what percentage of their organisation’s total expenditure is being reported to IATI.  

Increased support for IATI data use

Partner countries are recognising the benefits of using IATI data and this year the Government of Bangladesh imported IATI data directly into their very own Aid Information Management System. Their Ministry of Finance is now determined to use IATI data to improve decision making.

Data users can also find development and humanitarian activities more easily, with IATI’s recent launch of d-portal’s excellent new search features.

Remembering Simon Parrish

In July, we shared the sad news that Simon Parrish, who led Development Initiatives’ technical work on the IATI Secretariat from 2008 to 2013, had passed away. Simon’s work on collecting the evidence and building the case for transparent, timely and forward-looking data underpinned the creation of IATI in 2008. Many heartfelt tributes were received from across the development and open data sector, highlighting the immense value of Simon’s contribution.