23.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Fair
OVERVIEW
The Gates Foundation should be congratulated for beginning publication to the IATI Standard in March 2014. It has also published a moderately ambitious implementation schedule with plans to publish 73% of the assessed IATI fields by the end of 2015. In June 2014, the Foundation updated its information sharing policy to include a presumption in favour of disclosure. However, the policy does not include the harm tests or public interest overrides that are applied to exceptions to disclosure or an independent appeals process. In addition to publishing to IATI, the Gates Foundation also reports information on its grants to the OECD (the only philanthropic organisation to do so) and to the Foundation Center’s Glass Pockets reporting initiative.
ANALYSIS
The Gates Foundation scores 46.6%, placing it in the fair category. It is one of the biggest improvers in the 2014 ATI, gaining over 28 percentage points since 2013. This significant increase is owed largely to its publication to IATI, which includes 22 information items covering both organisation and activity-level information. It performs well on organisation planning and basic activity, classifications and financial information. It performs poorly on the provision of project documents and performance information (results, conditions and impact appraisals), particularly the latter on which it does not score any points. However, it is one of the few organisations to publish forward-looking activity budgets and one of only seven to publish the budget identifier, which aims to help align information on development flows with recipient country budget classifications. Of the 22 indicators that take format into account, 18 are published in machine-readable formats.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- The Gates Foundation should improve its publication to IATI so it is comprehensive and includes results and conditions data, links to project documents and sub-national location information. It should aim to update its IATI files on at least a quarterly basis.
- It should use its IATI data in its programming and coordination processes and promote access to this data, in the first instance via an open data portal.
- It should update its information sharing policy to reflect best practice on presumption of disclosure, exceptions, public interest overrides and independent appeals processes.
- The Foundation should work with IATI to develop specific guidance for philanthropic foundations and trusts and share best practice on publishing to the IATI Standard.
DONOR PROFILE
First published to IATI:
Mar-14
2013 ATI Score:
18.12%
2013 ATI Rank:
43