Global Integrity recently signed to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and published our (admittedly limited) IATI-related financial information using the amazing, free Open-Aid Register, a tool to turn information into an IATI-compliant XML feed! Woot!

For the less familiar, IATI is “a voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiative that includes donors, partner countries and civil society organizations,” whose mission is to improve the access and understanding of aid spending data through a common set of technical standards and publishing formats. In simple terms, the idea is for the public to know just how much aid money from various aid donors went to, say, health programs in northern Uganda last year.  IATI-registered donors post details of past, current, and/or planned aid project with defined sector descriptions, geographical information, and types of financial transactions.  You can find the list of all publishers here.  For Global Integrity’s IATI data, click here.

OpenAid Register is a free tool developed by Ruth del Campo (@ruthdelcampo) to help small and medium NGOs and non-profits publish their data according to the IATI standard.  We simply input our “aid data” (in Global Integrity’s case, small sub-grants to partner organizations in other countries) into the tool’s easy to use web form and out popped a clean, structured XML feed that met the IATI standard.  (For the non-nerds: XML, the acronym for Extensible Markup Language, is a widely used software language.)

While the information we published is small in volume, Global Integrity is pretty into this whole transparency thing, so it was long overdue for us to jump onto the IATI bandwagon.  Of course, you can always find our full list of donors, audited financials, and annual tax returns on our Funders and Financials page, where you will also now find links to our IATI data as well. 

— Hannah Varnell

— Image Credit: Craig Taylor