Jay Bhalla is the co-founder and executive director for the Open Institute, a global think/do tank of domain experts that provides advisory and technical services in the Open Data and Governance space.

In this clip, he discusses why the format of published aid data matters so much.

Read more about how format matters in the 2013 ATI.

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The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has been set up by a group of leading international development organisations, with the aim of making information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand.

Launched in September 2008 at the Accra High Level Forum on Aid
Effectiveness, this pioneering initiative brings together donors, developing
countries and civil society organisations to help donors and their partners
meet their Accra Agenda for Action commitments on aid transparency.

After widespread consultation, IATI has decided to do this by:

• developing common standards to determine what information participating donors will publish, as well as the format in which the information will be presented
• setting up an on-line registry that will record the location of information about the aid that participating donors have decided to provide

What does the initiative do?

The IATI standard provides universal project classifications and definitions,
so that citizens, governments, parliamentarians and people working in the
development community can find out:

• how much money is being provided each year
• when it was, or is, due to be paid out
• how funds are expected to be used

Donors choose their own systems for collecting and publishing information. But a new central registry will make it possible for people to find information quickly and easily because it will tell users exactly where the information they need has been published.

Organisations only need to publish their aid information in one place and one format, but many different users will be able to access the information they need and use it for their own diverse purposes.

This widens access to aid information and result in more openness and accountability. It will be easier to monitor aid effectiveness and will thus help to accelerate poverty reduction.

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Opening Up Aid: Better Data, Better Use