Improving humanitarian transparency with the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and the UN OCHA Financial Tracking Service (FTS)

Introduction

At the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul in May 2016, leading donor governments, non-governmental organisation (NGO) networks, and multilateral and UN agencies agreed the ‘Grand Bargain: A Shared Commitment to Better Serve People in Need’. This includes a set of proposals and commitments to increase the transparency of humanitarian financing.

Grand Bargain commitments on greater transparency

The Grand Bargain commitment states the following:

Aid organisations and donors commit to:

1. Publish timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data on humanitarian funding within two years of the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul. We consider IATI to provide a basis for the purpose of a common standard.

2. Make use of appropriate data analysis, explaining the distinctiveness of activities, organisations, environments and circumstances (for example, protection, conflict-zones).

3. Improve the digital platform and engage with the open-data standard community to help ensure:

• accountability of donors and responders with open data for retrieval and analysis
• improvements in decision-making, based upon the best possible information
• a reduced workload over time as a result of donors accepting common standard data for some reporting purposes
• traceability of donors’ funding throughout the transaction chain as far as the final responders and, where feasible, affected people.

1. Support the capacity of all partners to access and publish data.

Implementing the Grand Bargain commitments on transparency provides an unprecedented opportunity for increased political momentum and practical action to improve the quality, availability and use of data on crisis-related financing. This offers potential benefits to all involved, from the donors that fund humanitarian programmes and the international organisations and national actors that implement them, to those who receive assistance on the ground.

Within this commitment, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard has been identified as a common format for publishing data on humanitarian activities. The commitment also highlights the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)’s Financial Tracking Service (FTS) as a well-established, voluntary information platform for recording international humanitarian contributions, albeit requiring further improvements.

In this paper we introduce the purpose and functionality of both IATI and FTS and respond to questions that have previously been raised by humanitarian stakeholders. It should be read alongside other resources that provide more technical detail on how to publish to IATI, report to FTS and access IATI and other data.

This background paper has been produced by Development Initiatives (with the support of the IATI Secretariat) and UN OCHA on behalf of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Humanitarian Financing Task Team (HFTT). It is one component of the HFTT’s broader workstream on financial transparency.