UNDP and UNOPS appointed as hosts of the International Aid Transparency Initiative

At the end of 2022, the board of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) announced the decision to undertake a process to appoint a new host for the initiative. The United Nations’ Development Programme (UNDP) and Office for Project Services (UNOPS) have been appointed, with UNDP leading policy and technical services and UNOPS leading the financial and legal aspects of the consortium. We wish them every success.

DI enjoyed a decade of working as part of the hosting consortium for IATI, and took the decision not to apply to continue in this role. We will remain a member of IATI and are focusing our efforts on using and promoting the critical real-time data that IATI is uniquely helping bring to the fore. Our formal role on the hosting consortium will end on 30 June 2023.

DI helped establish IATI in 2008 and led the development of the IATI Standard when it was hosted in the UK’s then Department for International Development. We were the first NGO to publish to IATI, and in 2013 we became the technical lead for the first hosting consortium alongside UNDP, the governments of Sweden and Ghana, and UNOPS. We were reappointed in 2017 in a smaller hosting consortium with UNDP and UNOPS.

We are incredibly proud of the journey IATI has been on – from a political idea to an established global standard that brings transparency and accountability to international concessional financing. In our role we professionalised IATI’s technical tools and services, moving from numerous, siloed applications on various servers to an integrated microservices architecture (our Unified Platform). This provided consistency, stability and resilience for IATI’s technical estate. As part of this, we created an API Gateway to centralise where IATI users and external tools can programmatically access IATI’s data services. We also delivered the IATI Validator, IATI Datastore and the new IATI Publisher tool, making it easier than ever to publish, access and use IATI data. We also provided helpdesk services and bespoke individual support to publishers to improve use of the Standard and the quality of data.

The next chapter in DI’s journey with IATI will be to champion both the use of the Standard and the data it enables in order to improve aid spending and its impact at a time when this is under threat. DI regularly uses IATI data to support our efforts to protect aid and ensure this vital resource goes to the people and places that need it most. We will continue to use IATI data to produce novel insights and analysis, and support efforts to use IATI data in countries that receive aid so that they are better equipped and empowered to have a greater say over these resources.

If you are interested in working with us using IATI data, we would love to hear from you. Please get in touch with Claudia Wells, International Hub Director, at [email protected]