Why a standard?

IATI’s standard meets two important requirements on the transparency agenda.

It provides a common data format so that all donors publishing to the IATI standard release their information in the same way. This makes it easier for data users to access the information and compare it against other donor’s data.

And it provides an agreed framework of best reporting practice which delivers information that meets the needs of all stakeholders (particularly partner countries). Signatories agreed at IATI’s launch in Accra in 2008 that they would “share more detailed and more up-to-date information about aid in a form that makes information more accessible to all relevant stakeholders.”

Complying with the IATI standard is thus not just about publishing data formatted to IATI’s xml schema: it involves providing the data content that was agreed when the standard was approved in Paris in February 2011.

You can find out more by visiting the IATI Standard website.

What is the standard?

The standard publishes:

  • financial flows
  • results information
  • budgets
  • timelines
  • project descriptions and documentation
  • activity and sector codes
  • geographic data

It was designed for timely publishing of open, comparable and reusable data by:

  • developing country governments
  • donors
  • NGOs
  • aid information experts

It contains and uses:

  • electronic standards
  • schemas
  • codelists
  • developer and user documentation
  • an international community of support

There are three key components to the IATI Standard:

  • The Activity Standard
  • The Organisation Standard
  • The IATI Codelists

The activity standard is designed for reporting the details of individual aid activities. An activity is defined by the reporting organisation – depending on who is reporting, it might be a large programme, a small project or another logical grouping of work and resources.

The organisational standard is designed for reporting the total future budgets of organisations and forward planning budget data for recipient institutions and countries.

The IATI codelists are key to making IATI activity and organisation data from different publishers comparable. Numerical codes are used to represent many standard values in an IATI file – for example, organisation types such as “Government” or “National NGO”. Standard sector codes and organisational identifiers are also supported.