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? IATI members will be gathering in Bogota later this month to begin discussions about a new strategy. To support this, 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. He explores the issues and evidence that should inform how resources can be best used to make aid more effective and accountable.

As IATI thinks ahead to its new strategy in the coming year, one issue to consider is exactly who should be encouraged to publish among the network of aid organisations, and to what end. This network is highly diverse, spanning from the world’s largest and most powerful governments and development banks to local civil society organisations with just a handful of staff. There are differing views about this issue among the IATI community and distinct approaches taken by major aid donors in terms of transparency requirements on their implementers (or lack thereof). Reaching a consensus position on the way forward would be of great benefit to the aid transparency movement.

Who is currently publishing IATI data?

There are currently 1,641 registered IATI publishers. Among those, 230 are publishing with the recommended quarterly or monthly frequency that is needed to keep the IATI dataset up to date. 900 have published no new data in the past year. However, among the 230 regular publishers are many of the world’s largest aid organisations. Total financial flows published in 2023 amount to $258 billion. This is greater than the most recent annual amount of Official Development Assistance (ODA) recorded by the OECD (the preliminary ODA total for 2023 is $223.7 billion).

It should be noted that IATI data is management information and not subject to the same statistical treatments as the OECD data, which is used to count total ODA. So, loans are recorded at face value (rather than as “grant equivalent” amounts), and the same funds can be recorded multiple times: as money is passed from funders to implementers and then spent or passed on again, each organisation can publish its own spending of those same funds.

Almost 450 publishers recorded spending in 2023 (this includes the 230 regular publishers and others that have published only once or twice that year). Of these, just 35 organisations published 95% of the total aid flows recorded in the year, and the top spending 100 publishers account for more than 99.5% of the total. The following table illustrates how the publishers recording spending in 2023 break down by organisation type:

Organisation types	Number of organisations	Total 2023 spend (USD millions)
10 – Government	38	109,923
15 – Other Public Sector	11	12,697
21 – International NGO	155	3,019
22 – National NGO	115	1,542
23 – Regional NGO	5	42
30 – Public Private Partnership	3	5,043
40 – Multilateral	32	119,782
60 – Foundation	25	3,138
70 – Private Sector	36	256
80 – Academic, Training and Research	23	67
90 – Other	4	2,244
Grand Total	447	257,752

 

Governments recorded $110 billion of spending in 2023. This is equivalent to roughly half of total ODA spending by DAC members. There are several reasons why this figure is not higher:

• Some smaller DAC countries are not yet IATI publishers, including Poland, Austria, Czechia, Luxembourg and Portugal.
• Some major donors paused their IATI publishing in 2023: Switzerland, Spain and Australia.
• Some donor governments publish commitments but not disbursements and expenditure data.
• Some governments are not publishing their full portfolio of expenditure.
• Among non-DAC donors that are not ODA eligible, some are publishing IATI data (UAE and Saudi Arabia) while others are not (China and other BRICS countries).

Multilaterals include both development banks and UN institutions. Some additional multilateral or intergovernmental organisations are included in the Public Private Partnership category (Global Fund), or the Other Public Sector category (EC INTPA, ECHO and NEAR).

The organisations assessed in the Aid Transparency Index are mostly in these categories (the Index also includes the largest organisation in the Foundations category – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). The agencies in the Index (37 of which are included in the analysis above) make up 92% of the total spending recorded in IATI in 2023 ($237 billion). By scoring these organisations in the Index, scrutiny is maintained on their regular, comprehensive and high-quality publication of aid data.

International, Regional and National NGOs recorded a much smaller aid spend ($4.6 billion – 1.8% of the total flows) but include many more publishers – 275 in total.

This overview of IATI data shows who is publishing and how much they are spending. What about the detail of how aid is delivered? One aspect of this is the transparency of aid delivery chains and the network of aid organisations that are part of the aid system.

Transparency of the Network of Aid Delivery

Delivering large amounts of aid to the populations that need it can be challenging. Governments often channel funds by subcontracting a company, multilateral or NGO that subcontracts other organisations in turn, creating an aid delivery chain. This chain can involve consultancy firms, international NGOs, local government or academic institutions and, often at the end of a chain, local NGOs or CSOs. The various links in the chain can be based in the provider country, in the recipient country or in a third country, either in the global north or global south. Aid money is spent at each stage of this chain, with the various organisations providing services or taking management fees.

Among the many uses for aid transparency data (see our previous blog), is the mapping and tracking of money flowing between organisations. This is an area where IATI data can provide significant insights.

Other sources of aid data such as the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) and official development statistics include channel codes that identify some funding channels. However, these are often unspecific, or, when implementers are named, they only show the top of the chain, leaving the onward flows a mystery. And only large donors publish their development statistics in the CRS – principally the governments that make up the OECD Development Assistance Committee, as well as some other governments, and multilateral organisations. Implementers further down the delivery chain such as NGOs and private aid contractors do not submit aid data to the CRS.

The IATI Standard allows publishers to include information about the flows through the network of aid delivery. Donors and major aid organisations can publish names and unique references for the implementing organisations for each of their activities, as well as the receiver organisation for each transaction made in the project. Those implementing organisations can also publish their own IATI data showing how they spend the aid money they receive – either on their own project expenditure or through sub-contracts or sub-grants to other organisations. And this can continue along the delivery chain until all the money is disbursed or spent.

Another feature of the IATI Standard is to allow the linking of activities up and down the delivery chain, thereby facilitating the tracing of money as it flows from organisation to organisation.

By doing this we can better understand some of the challenges involved in channelling aid from donor countries to beneficiaries. We can identify where aid money is spent and by whom, and we can hold aid donors to account for who implements their projects. We have seen valuable work in this area done by journalists to identify funding to organisations whose activities are not consistent with the values or policy goals of the governments giving the aid. And aid data has been used to show how foreign policy and aid policy can be in direct contradiction in catastrophic ways. Our own research has used aid data to track spending by private contractors and show how much of this is spent on consultancy fees, and how much is channelled to local actors.

What’s the catch?

Ideally we would see all aid organisations publishing IATI data, giving full visibility of the aid delivery network. In practice, this is yet to materialise. It is encouraging to see the number of publishers gradually increasing over the years and many NGOs, contractors and CSOs have made commendable efforts to register as IATI publishers and start publishing their data. However, it takes considerable effort to sustain a regular publishing practice and incentives are often required to make this happen. Some donors, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and the UK have placed requirements or recommendations on their implementers to publish IATI data. These donors have employed various strategies to encourage compliance including close collaboration with implementers to build capacity and buy-in for IATI publication, training courses and monitoring. The IATI community should learn from these experiences to build a realistic picture of the level of effort and resources required to achieve similar results across the aid community.

It is important to be realistic about the scale of the challenge. We analysed the number of implementers recorded in the IATI dataset over the past five years and found 70,000 unique organisation names recorded as either the activity “implementer” or transaction “receiver”. And this number would increase further as more organisations publish their data and include other implementers or sub-grantees. The total number of aid organisations globally is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. Comparing these figures with the number of registered publishers provides an indication of how far there is to go to achieve a fully transparent aid delivery network.

And traceability – linking activities up and down the delivery chain to show how funds flow between projects – is even more nascent. We’ve looked into this before and found only 7,307 activity links among more than a million IATI activities. 90% of these links were added by just 30 publishers. These numbers may have increased recently, but the overall picture is unlikely to have significantly changed. Particularly noteworthy is the lack of linking between governments and multilateral aid agencies. Flows between these are some of the largest in the network, involving well-resourced organisations, and yet little progress has been made to link these up in the data.

What is the way forward?

As IATI prepares to write its new five-year strategy, the question of who should be publishing data and how to maintain regular, high-quality publication will be high on the list of priorities. IATI publication is a voluntary endeavour, so it requires creative thinking to come up with ways of encouraging organisations to keep publishing high-quality aid data.

The Aid Transparency Index creates incentives for organisations to regularly publish high-quality IATI data by publicising their performance in a competitive ranking. However, the resource intensity and complexity of the Index means that it could not be replicated with more than the fifty organisations we currently assess without significant additional resources.

Another powerful incentive for IATI publication is requirements funders place on their implementers. An open discussion about what publication requirements could be implemented by donors would be helpful. This should include learning from those that have already implemented an approach to delivery chain publication.

Several possible approaches should also be part of this discussion:

• Taking a staggered approach to implementer publishing

A significant challenge to ensuring implementers publish data down the delivery chain is the sheer numbers involved, particularly for the largest donors. USAID, for example, has recorded over 2,800 unique implementers receiving funds in the last five years. And US government regulation on reducing bureaucracy limits what USAID can require of these implementers. The UK’s FCDO recorded over 1,300 implementers in the same period.

One way to tackle this challenge could be to begin by requiring only the largest implementers to publish data. Eligibility could be based on a threshold of aid volumes received (for example, those receiving more than $100m per year, or the top 10% of receivers) or be limited to those that sub-grant or subcontract to other organisations down the delivery chain.

Prioritising in this way would quickly capture most funding flows downstream. For example, in the case of the US, requiring IATI publication by those organisations receiving over $100m in 2023 would apply to 30 organisations that received a total of $13.4 billion. The largest implementers often include multilateral agencies that already publish data – these could be encouraged to link their activities and transactions upstream so flows can be traced.

• Publishing on behalf of implementers

One alternative to imposing implementer publishing requirements is for large donors to publish the information about project delivery on behalf of their implementers. At present some donors publish all the available project documents themselves, and others expect their implementers to publish performance data and other documents further down the delivery chain. While either of these models works well from a transparency point of view, encouraging donors to publish more detailed information about the aid projects they fund could be a more realistic approach. This could include listing all implementers including sub-grantees or sub-contractors and publishing detailed project documents, including performance data and project information documents.

A large amount of data and information about projects can be published by those at the top of the aid delivery chain, as can be seen in the publication of those that score in the ‘very good’ category in the Aid Transparency Index. These organisations are publishing comprehensive data and documents which provide a detailed picture about the operations, performance and results of their aid projects.

This approach centralises the responsibility for publishing and transparency on the large funders. These well-resourced organisations should be able to institutionalise IATI publication within their bureaucracies. And the number of publishers requiring support and monitoring in this case is kept to a manageable number.

The main disadvantage of this approach is that it is not possible to publish the detail of onward flows further along the delivery chain since organisations can only publish the commitments and disbursements they have made themselves.

If this approach is taken by some donors, clear guidance should be developed so that data published using these differing approaches is compatible and comparable.

• Creating a database of aid organisations and unique references

The Aid Transparency Index introduced the Networked data indicator in 2022. The indicator assesses the use of standard references for the organisations or entities involved in delivering aid projects or receiving aid funds. This has led to demand for a comprehensive list of organisation references. The creation and maintenance of such a list would be a valuable tool for the analysis of the aid delivery network. Alongside consistent use of these references by publishers, the list would help analysts to map organisations in a comprehensive and consistent manner.

The role of the Aid Transparency Index

The Aid Transparency Index continues to play an important role in setting norms for good quality publication of IATI data. By continuing to monitor, assess and score the data publication of the world’s major aid organisations, the Index ensures that those publishing the vast majority of the financial flows continue to publish high-quality, timely aid data. While the Index takes care of these major aid donors, the rest of the IATI movement is freed up to focus on the direction it should take next to increase and improve aid data publication.

Ultimately, the chosen approach should be linked to the priority aims of IATI: to make aid more effective and accountable. We have framed this analysis based on making the highest volumes of aid transparent given limited resources. Other approaches could prioritise specific detail being made transparent or the transparency of, say, project performance and learning.

 

• The IATI community will convene for its annual Members’ Assembly and Community Exchange from 23-26 April in Bogotá, Colombia. There, IATI members will begin discussions about the strategic direction IATI should take in the coming years.
• This is the second blog in a series of inputs into the Members Assembly and Community Exchange. Our first blog, looking at the increase in use of aid data to inform development policy, is available here.
• Publish What You Fund will continue to track and monitor the transparency of the world’s major aid and development agencies with the Aid Transparency Index, the next iteration of which will be launched on 16 July 2024 in Washington DC.