• Report
  • 12 June 2017

Baseline report: Implementing and monitoring the Grand Bargain commitment on transparency

This report proposes a baseline methodology and framework to help signatories to meet their Grand Bargain transparency commitments and measure progress.

Development Initiatives (DI) is working with the Grand Bargain transparency workstream to support greater transparency of humanitarian data and help signatories meet their commitment. This report sets a baseline for the extent to which signatories are publishing their humanitarian data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard one year on from the World Humanitarian Summit.

As part of the Grand Bargain, signatory organisations agreed to work towards greater transparency by improving the quality, availability and use of data on humanitarian funding. Greater transparency will enhance accountability and decision-making and, critically, contribute to improving humanitarian effectiveness.

As a first step, signatories agreed to publish timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data on their humanitarian funding. IATI was identified as the basis for a shared, common standard.

The report proposes a methodology and monitoring framework for supporting signatories to measure their own progress in meeting the Grand Bargain commitment on greater transparency, as well as improvements to the IATI Standard to better meet the needs of humanitarian publishers and data users. It also offers recommendations for further action by the Grand Bargain transparency workstream and the wider humanitarian community, and a roadmap for taking these forward.

Key findings

Our initial assessment shows that there has already been considerable progress in just one year. Out of a total of 51 organisations that signed up to the Grand Bargain:

  • 43% (22 organisations) are already members of IATI
  • 73% (37 organisations or their members or affiliates) already publish some data to the IATI Standard
  • 61% (31 organisations or their members or affiliates) currently publish humanitarian aid data to IATI

More information on humanitarian funding is now becoming available, but there is still a need for more and better quality data. The report calls on Grand Bargain signatories to take steps to begin publishing their humanitarian data to IATI and to improve the quality of the data they publish.

The report uses IATI data published in a bespoke dashboard to enable signatories to track their own progress against the commitment. The dashboard was developed by DI, and is publicly available in beta version.

Read the report

More information

Download An introduction to IATI for humanitarian actors

Listen to our webinar series Improving humanitarian transparency with IATI

Read the Grand Bargain commitment from the World Humanitarian Summit 2016

Photo: UNICEF Ukraine

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