Aid organisations publishing in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard should publish data for the entirety of their aid and development portfolios. This visibility is critical for a number of reasons and for a number of stakeholders. Citizens in aid donor and partner countries need to see the full extent of aid flows including where and how aid money is spent. Complete data underpins all of the use cases of aid data including coordination among donors and with partner governments, accountability for aid delivered, and research and learning from the results and impacts of aid activities.

Publish What You Fund has been monitoring visibility for a number of years using a method developed from the IATI secretariat’s coverage approach. The Aid Transparency Index undertakes a visibility assessment to ensure that a sufficiently high proportion of the portfolio of an organisation’s aid spending is being published.

We have refined and formalised our visibility assessment for the 2024 Aid Transparency Index. This briefing paper sets out our process and any scoring consequences.

The assessment is made using a secondary source of annual total spend as well as using the IATI dashboard frequency assessment. The steps for assessing visibility include: checking frequency of publishing for each agency, and checking historic and current annual transaction figures to compare against an external source (generally the most recent and complete OECD-DAC data). We then identify agencies which have low visibility and communicate with them to ascertain the cause, and finally impose an Index score sanction if necessary.