At the fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness donors made a concrete commitment to increase the transparency of development cooperation by publishing information on their activities to a common, open standard. They committed to do this by December 2015. Donors also committed to publish schedules detailing specific plans and timelines for implementing the standard by December 2012. With just over a year to go before the final deadline, the Index results demonstrate that many donors remain off track in meeting their commitments, particularly on the implementation of the IATI elements of the Standard.

At the time of writing, of the 68 organisations included in the Index, 52 have published implementation schedules. Publish What You Fund has assessed and scored each schedule on their levels of ambition, based on the organisation’s intention to publish to the IATI component of the common standard (focusing on the fundamental requirement of timely and comparable data), the publication approach (the stated frequency and licence of publication) and the proportion of information fields to be published by the end of 2015.

The levels of ambition shown by different organisations varies significantly (see table below). Of the 52 schedules available, 20 are assessed as ambitious and 13 as moderately ambitious, meaning the majority of organisations included in the ATI are yet to outline any concrete plan to start publishing their information in a more timely and comparable format. These organisations need to take urgent action in order to meet their commitments by the end of 2015. Even donors with more ambitious plans still have work to do, including Belgium and Norway, whose schedules mention initial publication to the IATI Standard in 2014, but are yet to make a start. Very few schedules refer to publishing added-value information fields: less than a third include plans to publish data on results and conditions.

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Assessment of implementation schedules for ATI donors

*Japan’s implementation schedule does not provide a timeline for publishing to IATI, although JICA started publishing data to the IATI Registry in June 2014.