UNDP opens data in transparency drive

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) recently launched a new online portal allowing open, comprehensive public access to data on the agency’s work in 177 countries and territories, as part of their commitment to reach full transparency by 2013. As scheduled, UNDP has published its data in the IATI standard.

UNDP have registered 160 files with specific country information and 1 global file with information for all UNDP operating units. UNDP has now a total of 162 files in IATI registry, which have all been validated. According to Mark Cardwell, Chief of Online & Multimedia, UNDP will continue to improve their data sets while increasing the frequency of their publications going forward to 2013.

The new portal, open.undp.org, comprises comprehensive programmatic information— from income and expenditures to activities and results—on more than 6,000 active UNDP projects, as well as those that financially closed in 2011, along with more than 8,000 outputs or results. As the world’s largest implementing agency and with most of its projects being funded by multiple donors, UNDP has an important role to play in forwarding IATI’s goal of being able to trace aid from origin to final point of spend. The data published to IATI has taken a first important step in listing all funding organisations attached to each UNDP project.

Users can sort projects by focus areas, funding sources, and locations and extract detailed data related to budgets, implementing organizations, and targeted results in areas from governance and rule of law to crisis prevention and recovery. UNDP created the portal as part of its implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). As a member of the IATI Secretariat, UNDP has led outreach efforts with partner countries and United Nations agencies to champion the new aid transparency standard and make it relevant for national development planning, public financial management, mutual accountability, and other processes at the country level.

In October, leading international aid transparency organisation Publish What You Fund ranked UNDP in the top 10 among 72 organizations in its 2012 Aid Transparency Index. UNDP “should be congratulated for beginning publication to the IATI Registry in November 2011,” the organisation said.

“Transparency is a top priority for UNDP and a vital element in maintaining the trust vested in us by the public and our partners” UNDP Administrator Helen Clark said. “This online portal enables the public to track aid and helps our partners manage their resources more effectively.”