DI progress report: Grand Bargain signatories improve transparency

  • June 15, 2018

IATI Secretariat member, Development Initiatives (DI) has published a report reviewing transparency progress made as part of the Grand Bargain agreement.

As part of the Grand Bargain, signatories agreed at the World Humanitarian Summit (May 2016) to publish timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data on their humanitarian funding within two years.

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 report provides an update on progress made in meeting the Grand Bargain commitments on greater transparency since Development Initiatives’ baseline report (June 2017), as well as on improvements to the IATI Standard to better meet the needs of humanitarian publishers and data users.

Key findings

There has been good progress by Grand Bargain organisations in publishing open data on their humanitarian financing and providing much more useful and usable data on their activities. As of 1 May 2018:

  • 44 of 59 Grand Bargain signatories (75%) were publishing open data using the IATI Standard. An additional seven organisations have started publishing to IATI since the baseline report was published in June 2017.
  • Of the 44 signatories publishing open data using the IATI Standard
    • 36 (82%) were publishing open data on their humanitarian activities; five more organisations (or their members or affiliates) have started publishing their humanitarian activities than a year ago.
    • 8 (18%) were providing more granular humanitarian data than previously, such as information on humanitarian response plans or clusters.

Over the last year the IATI Standard has been further developed to enable even more granular reporting on humanitarian funding. Released in February 2018, version 2.03 enables signatories (and other IATI publishers) to show levels of earmarking, pledges, cash-based programming and whether funding is channelled via local and national responders.

  • 31 organisations or 70% of the Grand Bargain signatories publishing to IATI are now using either version 2.02 or 2.03 of the IATI Standard, both of which allow for some degree of detailed humanitarian reporting. An additional 15 organisations (or their members or affiliates) have made improvements to their internal systems by upgrading to a more recent version of IATI since the baseline report of June 2017.

Download the report and read more information on Development Initiatives’ work on the monitoring the Grand Bargain.