Budgets (overview)

There are two types of budget that every organisation publishing to IATI should provide: the total budget for an organisation, and a budget for each individual activity.

The total budget for an organisation should be a forward-looking budget. This covers all the funds, including programme, administrative, overhead and other costs that the organisation expects to spend on development and humanitarian activities. A user should be able to look at the organisation file and see the total budget for the organisation, which can be broken down into budgets for particular countries, regions and organisations.

A budget for an individual activity published to IATI could be, for example, the total budget for a vaccination programme in Bangladesh. The user should then be able to look at the activity files for an organisation and see how the budgets included in the publisher’s organisation file are divided into separate activities. Each activity can contain multiple organisations, countries and regions.

Both types of budget can be updated and adjusted at any point. All budgets should be provided from the point of view of the reporting organisation. The organisation and activity budget data allows users to find and analyse the data they need in the right format. They can also track if a publisher’s total budget towards a country or an organisation has been fulfilled, or check what percentage of their total spend for development and humanitarian work is reflected in their published activities. IATI recommends providing budget data for the next three years or more, where possible.