The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has been set up by a group of leading international development organisations, with the aim of making information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand.

Launched in September 2008 at the Accra High Level Forum on Aid
Effectiveness, this pioneering initiative brings together donors, developing
countries and civil society organisations to help donors and their partners
meet their Accra Agenda for Action commitments on aid transparency.

After widespread consultation, IATI has decided to do this by:

• developing common standards to determine what information participating donors will publish, as well as the format in which the information will be presented
• setting up an on-line registry that will record the location of information about the aid that participating donors have decided to provide

What will the initiative do?

The new standards will provide universal project classifications and definitions,
so that citizens, governments, parliamentarians and people working in the
development community can find out:

• how much money is being provided each year
• when it was, or is, due to be paid out
• how funds are expected to be used

Participating donors will bring together their existing processes for collecting
information about their aid expenditure and publish more information than at
present to meet the needs of a much wider range of users. As now, donors will
choose their own systems for collecting and publishing information. But a new
central registry will make it possible for people to find information quickly and
easily because it will tell users exactly where the information they need has
been published.

So organisations will only need to publish their aid information in one place
and one format, but many different information users will be able to access the
information they need and use it for their own diverse purposes. This will widen
access to aid information and result in more openness and accountability. It
will be easier to monitor aid effectiveness and will thus help to accelerate
poverty reduction.

IATI will not impose a one-size-fits-all approach but will build on existing
agreements and definitions. Information published will be tailored to a country’s
specific circumstances.

More about IATI…