HIV/AIDS Alliance is first INGO to publish to IATI

  • Oct. 17, 2011

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance have become the first International Non-Governmental Organisation (INGO) to publish data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

The Alliance works through a global partnership of community-based organisations to help prevent the spread of HIV, meet the challenges of AIDS, and build healthier communities. Working widely across four regions, the Alliance uses a series of Linking Organisations to act as intermediaries in over 40 countries.

The data published to IATI by the Alliance details 38 projects, funded through the Alliance’s International Secretariat. The projects are implemented by Alliance Linking Organisations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Alliance highlight that this data release comes as part of their commitment to value for money and cost effectiveness.  Sam McPherson, Associate Director of their Planning Analysis and Learning Unit, said:

The Alliance welcomed the IATI initiative from the beginning.  We have been committed to making our data available to all stakeholders through our Impact Microsite and interactive map.

Farai Matsika, Alliance’s Programme Officer in the Planning Analysis and Learning Unit, who coordinated their release of data to IATI, talked about how the process has changed the way the Alliance works internally:

The experience of ensuring that the Alliance’s programmatic and financial data met the IATI standard has had a significant impact on our work. We are already planning spin-off projects, for example remodeling our M&E system around the IATI standard.

The Alliance are aiming to provide more information in the future and are working with their Linking Organisations in-country to enable them to also become IATI-compliant. Details of new projects as well as updates to the status of existing ones will be added on a quarterly basis.

You can view the full Alliance data set via the IATI registry. Over the coming weeks we expect to see a number of graphs and charts emerging based on this data.

The IATI Data Explorer allows you to choose specific sets of aid activities to view in depth. The Guardian Global Development website has an array of visualisations based on donor-released data that’s worth taking a look at.

These projects, along with a number of others currently being worked on, means that data users should be able to view, and play with, the data in easy-to-understand visualisations.