Open data Archives

How transparent are climate funds?

By Ryan Anderton and Alex Tilley | Apr 2, 2025 | Blog

Multilateral climate funds play a crucial role in channelling significant portions of climate finance and will be key in efforts to meet the new $300 billion goal. But what do we know about how this climate finance is deployed, who receives it and the impact it’s having? To gain an insight into the transparency of these funds we have investigated the four largest multilateral climate funds: the Green Climate Fund, Global Environment Facility, Climate Investment Funds, and Adaptation Fund.

Expanding transparency beyond Official Development Assistance

By Sally Paxton, George Ingram and Guest | Mar 28, 2025 | Blog

As traditional aid shrinks, non-ODA financial flows are increasingly crucial. Their transparency, however, lags far behind. In this blog, Tessie San Martin, George Ingram and Sally Paxton assert that better visibility into non-ODA flows will unlock smarter investments and stronger outcomes. Therefore, extending transparency is essential to ensure new development funding achieves real impact

Who should publish aid data, and why?

By Alex Tilley | Apr 15, 2024 | Blog

Ideally, all aid organisations would publish detailed information about their programmes, spending and impact, allowing us full visibility of the aid delivery network. But there are hundreds of thousands of aid organisations around the world, and only 230 agencies (albeit the biggest ones) regularly publish data in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. So, with such a mountain to climb, and limited resources, where should the IATI community focus its efforts? Alex Tilley looks at who is currently publishing IATI data and considers the pros and cons of supporting all those organisations funding and implementing aid projects to publish data, versus just the largest.

How is open aid data being used?

By Elma Jenkins | Apr 4, 2024 | Blog

More organisations are now publishing more aid and development data, with richer detail than ever before. And more tools are being produced to enable a broader group of people with different interests to access the data. All this effort is not in vain. Elma Jenkins has been digging into the detail of exactly how open aid data is now being used and highlights some of the creative ways it is supporting research, policy and development practice.

Exploring IATI data wells with publisher owned portals

By Elma Jenkins and Guest | Sep 6, 2023 | Blog

The second blog in our series exploring aid data tools discusses portals produced by countries or institutions to provide access to their aid and development data. Elma Jenkins and Rolf Kleef review the differing levels of complexity – from high-level overviews to detailed data from multiple organisations and multiple data sources. They consider what features make for an accessible data portal, and provide a comprehensive list of the portals currently available.

Your step by step guide to researching funding for women’s economic empowerment and women’s financial inclusion

By Alex Farley and Sally Paxton | Nov 2, 2022 | Blog, News

We’ve produced two new guides for anyone wishing to track international funding for women’s economic empowerment (WEE) or women’s financial inclusion (WFI) in their own country. The guides are based on an approach we’ve developed and tested over the last two years, which is designed so that it can be used and adapted by decision makers, researchers and advocates for their own purposes – including holding funders accountable or advocating for different investments. The new step by step guides are concise, accessible and flexible – signposting to a range of other, more detailed resources.