IATI Annual Report 2020: Transparency achieved on US$1.28bn COVID-19 aid spending commitments
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has launched its Annual Report 2020. Data analysed for the report shows a huge commitment from donors and NGOs to improve the transparency of their spending related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the onset of the pandemic, IATI recognised the urgent need for open data on the responses to the crisis by international development and humanitarian communities. The initiative called for organisations to publish data on COVID-19-related funding using IATI's data standard and issued new guidance on how to do this in March 2020.
More data published
By the end of 2020, IATI data was published:
- by 172 organisations on COVID-19 including donor governments, UN agencies, the EU Commission and NGOs
- on nearly 10,000 development and humanitarian COVID-19-related activities
- on US$1.28 billion of COVID-19-related spending commitments
The availability of real-time COVID-19 data enables development and humanitarian actors to better plan, coordinate and evaluate their responses to the pandemic.
IATI's Annual Report 2020 shows impressive growth in the volume of IATI data published, not just on COVID-19 but across the international development and humanitarian sectors. For example, 152 new organisations started to publish their data to IATI in 2020 for the first time, representing a 14% increase in new publishers since 2019. Data published on the ways in which funds are contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals also more than doubled since 2019.
More use of IATI data
Good progress was made by IATI to promote the systematic use of IATI data by development and humanitarian actors. As a result, the governments of Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso reported using IATI data in their national budget planning processes, and to analyse resources flowing into their countries. Visits to IATI's search tool d-portal more than doubled in number compared to 2019, suggesting significantly higher demand for the kind of data available through IATI.
IATI's Annual Report also celebrates the progress achieved by the initiative during the first year of its ambitious Strategic Plan 2020-2025, working to meet its primary objectives of increasing data use, improving data quality, consolidating its technical core and invigorating the IATI community. Key activities included launching the IATI Validator, enabling organisations to automatically identify errors in their data files before publishing. A new community platform IATI Connect was launched to increase the collaboration of IATI's global community, enabling community members to engage in discussions ranging from data use to technical questions, with automatic translation in over 100 languages. A new Country Development Finance Data tool was launched to respond to specific data use needs of national governments.
Looking ahead, the initiative is well into delivering its ambitious workplan for the second year of implementation of IATI's Strategic Plan and will continue working to ensure that transparent, good quality information on development cooperation and humanitarian assistance is available and used to help achieve sustainable development outcomes.
View IATI's Annual Report 2020
Ends
Note to editors:
- For more information contact Rohini Simbodyal IATI Communications Adviser: rohini.simbodyal@devinit.org and media@iatistandard.org
- IATI is a global initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian resources and their results to address poverty and crises. See https://iatistandard.org/en/ for more information.
- Find IATI data published by over 1200 development and humanitarian organisations using the search tool d-portal.org.