All of the world's major donors have agreed to publish their data using the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard. Many now require that grantees and recipients report back to them in IATI format. In 2017, DevResults responded by developing one-click IATI exports. Earlier this summer we expanded our IATI support to include additional activity information. Now we've added even more options to better serve our customers who face mandatory IATI reporting requirements.
What is supported?
DevResults IATI exports include activity classifications and descriptions, financial and geographic information, and indicator results (including targets and baselines). See our knowledge base article for the full list of supported IATI elements.
How do I use it?
There are three steps for generating an IATI export.
- Configure your site: You only need to choose your IATI settings once to enable IATI reporting for all activities and all reporting periods. These options relate to program settings, status options, partner types, and geographies.
- Fill in activity elements: We walk you through how to add the information that ends up in the export, and review what's required versus optional according to IATI.
- Generate an IATI export: Simply download the XML file and you're ready to publish IATI data.
What's new?
There are four key takeaways for our recent updates:
- IATI tab: If you've enabled IATI reporting, you'll see a new IATI tab for each activity. This page allows you to capture a lot of the IATI-specific activity information that's not captured elsewhere.
- Finance tab: If you plan to include financial information in IATI reports, you'll need to enable the finance tab, which replaces the budget tab. The finance tab is built specifically to support the financial elements of IATI, but anyone can use it. You don't have to use the finance tab if you prefer the budget tab, but information in the budget tab won't be included in IATI exports. Eventually, we're going to expand the finance tab's features beyond what’s required for IATI and the budget tab will become a legacy feature.
- Changes to the activity overview page: A few minor updates here allow you to capture IATI elements like related activities and percentage budget breakdown per sector.
- IATI validator: Missing information required for the export? DevResults will let you know what's missing and where to add it.
Next steps
We're excited about this release but it won't stop here. Our plans for further improvements to IATI include:
- Supporting even more IATI elements.
- Adding import/export tools for the IATI and Finance tabs.
- Providing the option to define your own set of required IATI elements. This tool would require your choice of fields to be filled out before folks could generate an IATI export.
As always, we'd love your feedback at help@devresults.com.