The World Food Programme today became the 150th organisation to publish detailed, transaction level open data on its activities and spending to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard.

“The UN World Food Programme is delighted to be a part of this initiative,” says Chris Kaye, director of Performance and Accountability Management for WFP in Rome, Italy.

“Making information more easily available to wider audiences is an important step toward greater accountability. It will help donors better see how their funds are being used, and help the humanitarian community, including national governments, better identify how needs can be addressed. The more open that agencies like ours can be through initiatives like IATI, the better we will be able to combine resources with others to meet the needs of the world’s hungry.”

IATI was launched in Accra, Ghana in 2008 to improve the quantity and quality of data available on aid and development flows and works to make this data available in a timely, comprehensive and comparable format. Users, whether governments, parliamentarians, citizens in aid recipient countries, civil society organisations or the media, can access data from a wide range of organisations and institutions.

IATI helps reduce waste, fight corruption and makes sure money gets to the people who need it most. Better information at country level is right at the heart of what the Initiative is about – empowering people on the ground to scrutinise and make better decisions.

The UK Department for International Development (DFID) was the first organisation to publish to the IATI standard in January 2011, with United Nations Women’s programme the 100th in November 2012. Government and multilateral publishers include Sweden, the United Nations Development Programme, the United States and the World Bank, while foundations such as Comic Relief and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and household name NGOs like Oxfam GB and World Vision UK have also started to publish data on their activities.

The 150 publishers are categorised as follows and a full list of all publishers, and links to their data, can be found on the IATI Registry.