The main change for the 2026 index is the move towards an accreditation-based model. For the first time, it will become a paid-for service, expanding its reach to include a wider range of aid and development organisations. These organisations will have the opportunity to be independently assessed, benchmarked, and formally recognised for their transparency.

The Index is open to all aid organisations that meet a set of minimum criteria:

1. Organisations engaged in international aid, development, humanitarian, climate change or related activities.
2. Organisations with an annual budget of at least $20 million and at least 50 ongoing projects, investments or programmes. Smaller organisations would have limited benefits from the process.
3. Organisations should have a formal commitment to transparency outlined in a policy or strategic document.

General scoring approach

The 2024 Index methodology uses 35 indicators to monitor aid transparency. The indicators have been selected using the information types agreed in the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard. The indicators represent the most commonly available information items where commitments to disclosure already exist. In addition, organisations’ overall commitment to aid transparency is measured by the existence of Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation or disclosure policies, plans for IATI publication and the organisation’s efforts to promote access, use and re-use of its information.

Groups and sub-groups

The 35 indicators are grouped into five weighted categories. Organisation planning and commitments to aid transparency account for 15% of the overall weight. Finance and budgets account for 25%. Project attributes, Joining-up development data and Performance are equally split and each account for 20% of the overall weight.

Most information is gathered from what is published online by each organisation – either on their website, on the IATI Registry or on national data platforms such as the U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard. Two indicators use secondary data sources, to assess the quality of Freedom of Information legislation and donor’s implementation schedules.

If the organisation is not an IATI publisher then all the information is collected via the manual survey. For organisations that are publishing to the IATI Registry, data collection follows a two-step process:

• First, their data is run through the data quality tool of the Aid Transparency Tracker, which is designed to run automated checks and tests on each organisation’s data, providing both a comparative view across organisations and granular details on each organisation’s data. These tests are aggregated to produce scores for indicators to which they are relevant.
• Next, for those indicators for which information is not published to the IATI Registry or does not pass the necessary tests, the data is collected via the manual survey.

All organisations are provided with an opportunity to review the assessments and provide us with any feedback for consideration. Surveys are also independently reviewed.

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.