The United Nations (UN) system plays a central role in delivering development and humanitarian assistance, managing over US$68 billion in revenue in 2024 and operating in more than 160 countries. Given this scale, transparency is essential to support coordination, accountability, learning and effective use of resources.

In a new brief launched today, Publish What You Fund has reviewed the transparency practices of 20 of the largest operational UN agencies, focusing on how consistently and effectively they publish financial and programme information in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. This global standard enables comparability with other development and humanitarian finance.

Most UN agencies publish data to IATI

The review, Making Impact Visible: UN Transparency and the Global Data Landscape, finds that transparency infrastructure across the UN system is now largely established. 18 of the 20 agencies publish data in the IATI Standard, a majority report to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) Creditor Reporting System, and most operate their own open data portals. This reflects broad alignment with international transparency norms and represents a significant portion of data on UN activities and financing.

Gaps in data limit visibility

However, transparency in practice still remains uneven. Our review found:

• Less than half of the agencies reviewed publish IATI data on a regular monthly basis, limiting the usefulness of information for real-time coordination and oversight.
• Organisational transparency is particularly weak: only a small number of agencies publish current organisation strategies or forward-looking budgets.
• While financial transaction data is more widely available, project-level budgets are often highly aggregated and rarely extend beyond short time horizons.
• Most gaps found in the data relate to delivery chains and impact: Few agencies disclose sub-national locations or implementing partners, constraining visibility over where and with whom programmes are delivered. Results and evaluation data is scarce, with only a handful of agencies publishing regular results information, making it difficult to link funding to outcomes or assess effectiveness at scale.
• The findings show clear transparency differences between the agencies that have previously been assessed through the Aid Transparency Index and those that have not.

Strengthening transparency to demonstrate impact and value

This review comes at a time  of heightened external scrutiny and financial uncertainty. The recent decision by the US to withdraw from or terminate funding for approximately 31 UN agencies, including a number of those reviewed in this brief ,highlights the critical importance of transparent, high-quality financial and programme data. In this environment, transparent disclosure of resources and activities is essential for enabling Member States, donors, partner governments, and civil society to assess performance, manage risk, and maintain confidence in multilateral cooperation. Further, this challenge is becoming more acute as policy analysis and decision-making are increasingly shaped by AI-enabled tools that rely on structured, machine-readable information. Work that is not visible in data risks being overlooked altogether. Strengthening transparency is therefore not a technical exercise, but a prerequisite for a credible, effective, and trusted UN system.

A critical window to act

The UN system now has a critical opportunity to re-affirm and strengthen its commitment to transparency. The UN80 reform process provides a timely platform to coordinate disclosure practices across agencies. A more structured, system-wide approach could reduce duplication, foster shared learning, and accelerate measurable improvements in transparency.

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About the research series

This is the first in a series of four ‘Making Impact Visible’ reports that we will release over the course of the next year.

Every two years, Publish What You Fund produces the Aid Transparency Index, which assesses the world’s leading aid and development finance organisations and provides a detailed and granular analysis of their transparency. However, the universe of organisations involved in delivering aid and development is far broader than those that can be included within the Index itself. This series, therefore, provides an opportunity to examine transparency across four important groups of actors in the aid and development delivery chain:

1. UN agencies
2. Major philanthropies
3. Private aid contractors
4. Non-traditional donors

Together, these reports will offer a consistent and comparable assessment of the quality, comprehensiveness, and timeliness of the information these organisations publish, helping stakeholders understand how visible their activities and impact are within the global development data landscape.