The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) provides a standard to publish information on aid activities, and is intended to be used by (and useful for) all actors in development aid.
Interest is definitely growing and several organisations are investigating how to implement the standard. In several countries, national platforms of civil society organisations (CSOs) are engaging in discussions with their respective Ministries how to encourage and support implementation of IATI by CSOs. In the UK, DFID is even making IATI-compliant publication of data a condition for funding. Implementing IATI brings to the surface various issues that need to be addressed, some specific for CSOs.
Within IATI, a dedicated informal working group is discussing these implications for CSOs. This CSO Working Group has produced a Background Paper, attempting to provide a comprehensive overview of such issues, and to work towards ways forward.
As a next step, the CSO Working Group wants to
clarify these issues and establish some “ground-rules” with the members of the IATI Steering Committee (which include all IATI donor signatories) for the implementation of IATI by CSOs as “development actors in our own right”.
and is proposing a protocol to underline the CSO commitment to transparency and to support the implementation of the IATI Standard by CSOs.
The draft proposal for this Protocol on the Implementation of the IATI Standard by CSOs and NGOs is out for broad consultation, and you are invited to give your feedback before mid-September (for instance via comments on the Google Document). It will be refined based on the feedback, and submitted to the IATI Steering Committee for its meeting in the last quarter of 2012.