DFID IATI Guidelines (Policy)
Updated 26 April 2018
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfid-iati-guidelines/dfid-iati-guidelines-policy
How to use the IATI Standard for Partners, Contractors and Suppliers of DFID
The DFID IATI Guidelines Policy document outlines DFIDs ambition around transparency and the expectations DFID has of its partners. This document also provides an overview of which IATI fields need to be filled in. If you are looking for more technical guidance, download the DFID IATI Guidelines Technical document which also provides an overview of which IATI fields need to be filled in, but additionality, provides in-depth technical guidance of how to fill these fields in. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfid-iati-guidelines
Foreword
In Britain we are proud of our democracy and openness. As British citizens, we can access information to make choices and have a say in decisions which affect our lives. For the same reasons, DFID helps to improve transparency in developing countries to improve the lives of the very poorest and most marginalised.
The UK Aid Strategy, DFID’s Bilateral Development Review and Transparency Agenda “Open aid, open societies” set out the ambition for DFID and its partners to increase the effectiveness of the international aid system for those who receive UK aid through greater transparency, accountability and value for money. DFID’s vision is for complete transparency so that anyone, anywhere, can trace our funding through a project’s delivery chain. All partners receiving DFID’s funding share the responsibility for ensuring the transparency of the work we do together; transparency of their own funding and improving the transparency of their implementing partners.
DFID places great value on transparency and accountability. For this reason, DFID is a key supporter and member of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). IATI is actively supported by stakeholders that are involved in all aspects of development co-operation - including multilateral organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Investment Funds and Partner Governments. The goal of IATI is to increase co-ordination of our finite collective development resources, by supporting collaboration between funders, partners and in-country stakeholders. DFID’s core standard for partners in future will be publication of activity data in accordance with the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
Alongside DFID, there are now over 650 organisations that publish information using the framework provided by the IATI data standard. We see this as a foundation for mass collaboration. DFID will work with and encourage all implementing partners of UK aid, including private contractors and recipient governments, to meet global transparency standards.
Introduction and Principles
DFID invests in transparency because it helps build trust, improves accountability, guides better decision making and helps to tackle corruption. Open and accessible information can support citizens to understand the development decisions that affect them and help build the knowledge they need to hold their governments and development actors to account. It also provides development organisations with access to information on programmes being run by other organisations.
The purpose of this guide is to provide organisations in receipt of DFID funding, “partners”, with clear and accessible information on their responsibilities to produce relevant, timely and high-quality data, under transparency provisions within their agreement or contract with DFID.
What is the International Aid Transparency Initiative
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a global initiative to improve the transparency and accountability of aid funding. It has several key stakeholder groups - providers of funding to development and humanitarian programmes (donors), partner country governments, civil society and the private sector.
The IATI open data standard sets out how to share information common across all organisations working on international development and humanitarian activities. Once published, this timely, relevant and accessible information is available for anyone to use.
The information that is shared includes covers basic activity information, participating organisations, geopolitical information, classifications, results, transactions and relevant documents.
Responsibilities and Expectations
As an organisation, DFID places great value on publishing and using IATI data. To assist your organisation, this document details the core mechanisms within the IATI data standard for partners to use. To achieve transparency, it is essential that DFID’s partner organisations use the IATI open data standard correctly, following the guidelines to publish timely, relevant and accessible good quality data.
Partner Organisations are responsible for producing and publishing their data to the IATI Registry in accordance with these guidelines. DFID will monitor the extent to which partners are meeting the requirements as set out in this guide using tools such as the IATI Dashboard, validation tools and through Annual Reviews. Accountable Grant Agreements, Memoranda of Understanding and Contracts
Clauses are included in our standard Accountable Grant Agreements, Memoranda of Understanding and contract documents that explain DFID’s transparency expectations from our partners. The Accountable Grant template states direct partners, who receive funding from DFID, will publish details of direct funding to IATI within 6 months of the start of the agreement. We further expect partners to publish details of all their non-DFID funding and for downstream partners to publish details of their funding to the IATI standard.
The MOU template states that the partner will “work towards applying transparency standards in line with the UK aid transparency guarantee…” Similar wording is included in supplier contract documents.
Accountable Grant Agreements, Memoranda of Understanding and Contracts
Clauses are included in our standard Accountable Grant Agreements, Memoranda of Understanding and contract documents that explain DFID’s transparency expectations from our partners. The Accountable Grant template states direct partners, who receive funding from DFID, will publish details of direct funding to IATI within six months of the start of the agreement. We further expect partners to publish details of all their non-DFID funding and for downstream partners to publish details of their funding to the IATI standard.
The MOU template states that the partner will “work towards applying transparency standards in line with the UK aid transparency guarantee…” Similar wording is included in supplier contract documents.
Sensitive information and exclusions
DFID requests organisations to review sensitive activities on a case-by-case basis, to reach a balanced and proportionate approach that ensures essential safety while still publishing useful and meaningful IATI data. It is the responsibility of the publishing organisation to determine what information can be published.
This is especially relevant to partners who work in extremely complex situations, where activities can be considered sensitive: e.g. in the areas of conflict, human rights, gender, good governance, or commercial information.
In such a situation, partners may want to exclude some or all details of an activity in order to protect those involved. In such a situation you must decide on what can be published and what cannot. Reasons to exclude data depend on each organisation and can vary from security concerns to the need to protect commercial information. There are many ways in which you can adapt your data to show less detail, thus making the data less sensitive, but still communicate the nature of your activities. Some examples are:
- anonymise the implementing (or the funding) organisation
- publish a recipient region (i.e. a region consisting of several countries) in cases where showing the recipient country or specific location is too sensitive
- adapt the descriptions of the activity
- don’t publish personal information, such as names of individuals
The partner should communicate the reason for any exclusions with the DFID Senior Responsible Owner or Programme Manager.
Exclusion Policy
It is the responsibility of each implementing partner to determine and produce an exclusion policy for their organisation. This document should provide the rationale for what circumstances data elements are excluded, and must be publicly available, for example on their website.
BOND provides advice on this through their Open information and NGOs guidelines.
Non-fulfilment
It could impact on continued funding if these requirements are not met. DFID Senior Responsible Owners / Programme Managers will advise partners where this is the case bearing in mind the different wording in the agreements which are in place. There will also be some cases where DFID partners face genuine challenges to making progress and DFID Programme Managers will take that into account when deciding what action to take.
Data Use
DFID will use the data from partners to improve what we do. It will help us to monitor DFID-funded activities and to support accountability. It will help us to make better decisions about what, where and how we can best achieve our strategic objectives. DFIDs ambition is to re-use data from partners in the following ways:
- Our transparency team will update DevTracker (our public information portal for UK aid spending)
- Our programme teams will be able to better understand the reach of initiatives, or understand what collective efforts are being made by the community in addressing development challenges
- Our better delivery team will be able to see the relationships between downstream partners
- Our policy teams will be able to better understand priorities across sectors, location and types of interventions
- Our executive management and ministerial teams will be able to see more comprehensive high-level portfolio data
To achieve these ambitions, it is essential that DFID’s partner organisations take responsibility to publish timely, relevant and accessible good quality data in accordance with these guidelines.
Support
The IATI open data standard is maintained by the IATI technical team which is part of the IATI Secretariat. You can contact them directly at support@iatistandard.org. Every organisation creating and sharing IATI data is responsible for producing timely, relevant and high-quality data.
Criteria
DFID expects all organisations receiving funding to publish an IATI data set and following the criteria listed below. Once published, data should be updated and published at least once every quarter. These criteria are divided into:
- general requirements: the basic requirements an IATI data set must meet
- IATI organisation file: the file that describes your organisation
- IATI activities file: a detailed report about the activities your organisation carries out
These requirements will be reviewed occasionally and may change with internationally agreed technical IATI-standard updates or based upon new insights; you will be informed of any updates.
Not all data elements (or fields) of either the IATI organisations or the activities files are required in reporting in line with the DFID standards. In the sections below, it is indicated which fields are required and which are not.
General requirements
| IATI version | IATI standard version 2.02 or higher. |
|---|---|
| Validity | Organisations are expected to publish an IATI data set that validates against the corresponding IATI schema version. To test your own data, visit the IATI Public Validator. Note: the IATI Public Validator only checks the structure of the published XML, not the content. |
| Frequency | Organisations are expected to renew their publication at least on a quarterly basis, within a month after the end of each quarter. The link to the IATI data set must be made available on the IATI registry. (http://iatiregistry.org) E.g. the IATI data set covering activities until 2018-03-31 should be published by 2018-04-30 on the IATI registry. |
| Language (of descriptions/narrative) | Preferably English. Narratives in other languages can be included if available. |
| Completeness / coverage | An IATI publication is mandatory for all activities funded by DFID. |
| Scope | Your IATI activity data should contain all the activities which are funded by DFID, as a minimum. If the support to these activities is used to implement (underlying) activities, you should also publish these in your data. Example: DFID funds a programme which you subdivide into 6 implementing activities. You publish 7 activities: the programme and the 6 activities funded through the programme. Where programmes or activities are co-funded, matched funded or joint funded you also include the funds and commitments being provided by third parties. (see chapter ‘Error! Reference source not found.’). |
IATI Organisation file
The IATI organisation file is used to describe your organisation. It is designed to report forward-looking aggregate budget information for the reported organisations and planned future budgets to recipient institutions or countries. The IATI organisational file is also used to provide links to relevant public documents that are not related to one or more specific activities. It is expected that every organisation publishing IATI data should include one organisation file, which is updated at least annually.
| Organisation Data | ||
|---|---|---|
| Annual forward planning budget for organisation | Yearly forward-looking information on the whole organisation or agency budget, specified by budget line item. Please include at least one year of forward looking data: when publishing in 2018 include budgets for 2019. | Yes |
| Annual forward planning budget for funded organisations | The annual amounts your organisation plans to disburse to each of your partner organisations. | Yes, if available |
| Annual forward planning budget for countries | Yearly forward-looking budget for each country worked in by the reporting organisation. | Yes, if available |
| Organisation documents | Documents relating to the organisation. This includes: Annual reports, strategic plans, exclusion policies other documents that provide relevant information on the organisation and its scope of work. | Yes |
IATI Activity file
The following table describes the elements to be published in the IATI activity file for each specific activity. For the formal specification of the elements, please refer to the IATI standard website: http://iatistandard.org
Ideally, all the information that relates to a specific activity should be kept together as much as is possible as this makes the ultimate use of the data by any third party much more efficient. Data should be cumulative (e.g. if publishing every quarter, the updated activity will include the quarter being reported on, the previous quarter reported last time, and so on). It will also enable amendments to be made to existing data.
No data should be removed or deleted from published files. It is intended that once published, data remains permanently available.
Organisations are responsible for producing timely, relevant and high-quality data which will be updated on a quarterly basis.
DFID requests organisations to review sensitive activities on a case-by-case basis, to determine a balanced situation between safety and still publishing useful and meaningful IATI data
| Identification | ||
|---|---|---|
| Reporting Organisation | Unique identifier and name of organisation reporting the activity. | Yes |
| IATI activity identifier | Constructed with the Reporting Organisation unique identifier and the organisation’s chosen activity number. | Yes |
| Other Activity Identifier | An internal reference number for the activity. | Not required |
| Basic Activity Information | ||
|---|---|---|
| Title | Title of the activity. | Yes |
| Description | Description of the activity. | Yes |
| Activity Status | Status of the activity (Pipeline/Implementation/…). | Yes |
| Activity Date | Start and end dates of the activity. | Yes |
| Contact Info | Contact address and email for the reporting organisation. | Yes |
| Activity Scope | The geographical scope of the activity: regional, national, sub-national, etc. | Not required |
| Participating Organisations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Participating Organisation | Funding: Organisation Name, Organisation Type and Organisation Identifier | Yes |
| Implementing: Organisation Name, Organisation Type and Organisation Identifier | Yes | |
| Accountable: Organisation Name, Organisation Type and Organisation Identifier | Yes | |
| Extending: Organisation Name, Organisation Type and Organisation Identifier | If applicable | |
| Note: If you work with organisations who also publish to IATI, you are strongly encouraged to use their unique IATI organisation identifiers. |
| Geopolitical Information | ||
|---|---|---|
| Recipient Country | The country or countries that benefit from the activity. | Yes |
| Recipient Region | The region(s) that benefit from the activity. | Yes |
| Location | Location of the activity on a sub-national level. | If available |
| Classifications | ||
|---|---|---|
| Sector | The sector(s) that the activity benefits according to the OECD DAC CRS Purpose Code (5 digit). | Yes |
| Policy Marker | Indicators which track key policy issues. | Yes |
| Collaboration Type | Whether the resource flow is bilateral or multilateral. | Not required |
| Default Flow Type | Whether the activity is funded by Official Development Assistance (ODA), Other Official Flows (OOF), etc | Yes |
| Default Finance Type | Financing mechanism – grant/loan/capital/export credit etc. | Yes |
| Default Aid Type | Type of assistance provided | Yes |
| Default Tied Status | Whether there are restrictions on the aid (Y/N) | Yes |
| Country Budget Items | Alignment of activities with both the functional and administrative classifications used in the recipient country’s Chart of Accounts. | Not required |
| Financial | ||
|---|---|---|
| Budget | Budget for the activity (use budget type: original) | Yes |
| Planned Disbursement | Planned payment schedule for future disbursements. | If available |
| Capital Spend | The percentage of the total commitment that is for capital spending. | Not required |
| Transactions | Incoming Commitments | Yes |
| Incoming Funds | Yes | |
| Commitments | Yes | |
| Disbursements | Yes | |
| Expenditures | Yes | |
| Note: For convenience, it is recommended you aggregate expenses on quarterly basis and publish this total amount. If you wish to go into more detail, feel free to do so, but IATI is not a financial audit. |
| Related Documents | ||
|---|---|---|
| Document Link (incl. Activity Website) | Documents relating to the activity including project proposal, Theory of Change, reports, pictures, project updates etc. A01 - Pre- and post-project impact appraisal, A07 - Review of project performance and evaluation, A08 - Results, outcomes and outputs, Etc.. | Where applicable and if contractual agreement with DFID |
| Relations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Related Activity | Another separately reported IATI activity that is related to this one. | If applicable |
| Performance | ||
|---|---|---|
| Legacy Data | The legacy data element allows for the reporting of values held in a field in the reporting organisation’s system which is similar, but not identical to an IATI element. | Not required |
| Conditions | Information on the conditions for the project | If available |
| Result | Data on results and indicators of the project. Please take note of the following requirements: 1. Where possible, indicator values should be numeric. 2. For each indicator the baseline, target and actual values are mandatory. This is essential to assess the progress. Note that you are free to use any indicators as you see fit to publish your progress. More specific requirements are listed in Error! Reference source not found. | If available |
| CRS | Additional items specific to CRS++ reporting | Not required |
| FSS | This section allows entry of data required for the OECD DAC Forward Spending Survey at an activity level. | Not required |