Manual checks and sampling are conducted by Publish What You Fund staff on 16 indicators published in the IATI Standard. The purpose is to ensure that the information published for these indicators is what it should be and encourages the publication of high quality information to the IATI Registry with the aim of benefiting data users.

Manual checks and sampling are conducted twice: first, as part of the initial assessment; second, at the end of data collection. The results of the first round of manual checks and sampling are shared with the donor organisation, giving them the chance to fix any issues. After data collection has closed, Publish What You Fund will notify donors of sampling results in order that any data errors can be fixed. However, improvements to this data will not be taken into account for the final Index results.

For five indicators relating to organisational planning, Publish What You Fund’s team will manually check that the documents published on the IATI Registry are up-to-date and meet both the requirements of the IATI Standard and the Index indicator definition. A single document is expected for each of the following indicators: organisation strategy, annual report, allocation policy, procurement policy and audit.

For individual projects and operations, 11 indicators are sampled to manually verify that the information provided meets the required criteria and definition against which they are being scored. This includes, among others, project budget documents, reviews and evaluations as well as sub-national locations. Sampling is conducted on 20 current projects and operations. These are randomly selected. A minimum of ten project documents or data need to pass sampling to be scored as IATI data.

For a full list of sampled indicators and more details, please see the2022 technical paper.