14.
United Nations Children’s Fund
Good
OVERVIEW
UNICEF began publishing to IATI in June 2013. It should be congratulated for significantly improving the quality of its IATI publication in 2014, to include 10 additional fields including forward-looking budgets and performance data. UNICEF also launched a new open data portal in June 2014 which provides data directly from its systems on programme budget allocations and expenditures in all the countries that UNICEF operates in. UNICEF published an ambitious implementation schedule in June 2013, specifying plans to publish 94% of the assessed IATI fields by the end of 2015. UNICEF’s 2010 Information Disclosure Policy includes a presumption of disclosure, however the exceptions to this are not adequately harm tested and there is no independent appeals process.
ANALYSIS
UNICEF scores 64.6%, placing it in the good category. It ranks 10th out of 17 multilateral organisations. It is one of the biggest improvers in the 2014 ATI, gaining over 20 points since 2013. The improvement is attributable to an increase in the number of information items it publishes to IATI including activity dates, forward-looking budgets at the organisation and activity level and results data. UNICEF is the highest scoring organisation within the good category on activity classifications and financial data. It performs less well on organisation planning information and the provision of project documents as it does not include links to these documents in its IATI files, however a majority of these are available via UNICEF’s website. UNICEF does not consistently publish information on its project implementing partners. Of the 22 indicators that take format into account, 20 are published in machine-readable formats. Overall, it does not score on five of the 39 indicators, including budget documents, impact appraisals and MoUs.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- UNICEF should improve its IATI publication so it is comprehensive and includes more granular information in on its operational projects, contracts and transactions, links to project documents, information on implementing partners and results and conditions data.
- It should use its IATI data in its programming and coordination processes and promote the access and use of this information by others.
- UNICEF should work with other humanitarian aid organisations through the IATI humanitarian working group to ensure that the Standard fully meets the need of humanitarian aid operations.
DONOR PROFILE
First published to IATI:
Jun-13
2013 ATI Score:
44.31%
2013 ATI Rank:
21