standard
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)and its standard have been a recurrent theme of this website, because we believe that this is a very concrete and relatively simple measure with great potential to improve aid effectiveness.
Again and again OpenAid has been explaining the merits of IATI and its implementation online, in workshops and in discussions with stakeholder. Below you will see, how the IATI Standard actually looks like. After long consultations and discussion the list of information items has been agreed at the IATI Steering Committee meeting in Paris on the 9th of February 2011. The standard is divided into a section on a donor organisation and a section on the activity level, including information on implementing agency, project area, project sector and financial flows. This is the first version of the standard and it may be updated after some time.
IATI Standard Version 1
A. Organisation Information
- Area Annual forward planning budget data for agency
- Annual forward planning budget data for funded institutions
- Organisation documents (Those already published until end of 2011; after this date other documents)
- Annual forward planning budget data for countries
It is very hard to make predictions about the impact of a conference. But given all we know about aid effectiveness and the potential of transparency it is very likely, that yesterdays meeting of the Steering Committee of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) in Paris is indeed a milestone for effective aid and for accountability towards citizens. After nearly three years of work and consultations representatives of donor agencies, partner countries and civil society organisations came together yesterday to agree on a transparency standard. Read more »
Whenever I make presentations about aid transparency some people in the audience will inevitably ask: “But surely, you don't want to publish everything?” In a recent workshop on aid transparency one researchers in development policy explicitly warned against “full disclosure” - some negotiations in development cooperation require secrecy, he suggested. At another occasion people in the audience worried that publishing salary levels of expatriate staff or freelance consultants would cause a lot of criticism among beneficiaries. Read more »
Finalisation of data and information standard to be adopted by IATI signatories, i.e. bilateral and multilateral donors.
OpenAid believes that aid transparency is a crucial element of better service delivery in development cooperation. Therefore we strongly support the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) that aims to provide accessible, standardised, up-to-date, detailed and open data about development cooperation.