As an action point from the IATI Members’ Assembly in Rome, we agreed to develop and publish a clear value proposition for IATI. This text was originally submitted by Anna Densham as a contribution by DFID. Please review and add any comments or suggestions you have on this before November 15th.
Draft Value Proposition Statement:
The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, as well as continuing humanitarian need around the world, continue to demand that all development stakeholders work in increasingly smarter ways to be ever more effective in helping to reduce poverty and alleviate suffering. Technology continues to evolve and provide us with new ways to achieve this.
Since the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011, there has been an exciting growth in momentum to share and use data to support our collective efforts towards the SDGs. IATI’s vision is for transparent, good quality information on development resources and results to be available and used by all stakeholder groups to help achieve sustainable development outcomes. As the IATI community, we have the potential to transform the aid landscape with rapid growth in the publication and use of data since IATI’s technical infrastructure is open to all data publishers and users involved in the aid landscape.
The IATI open data standard is a global public good that enables any organization to publish data that is compatible with data from other IATI publishers and, increasingly, with data about public procurement and public spending. As such, IATI data provides a basis for the essential integration of data on aid and development finance with budget and other data in partner countries, as well as stronger financial management and accountability for how it is spent and what it delivers.
Becoming a member of the IATI community offers organisations around the world the unique opportunity to help make this vision a reality. Our mission is threefold: 1) to ensure transparency of data on development resources and results; 2) to ensure the quality of IATI data is continually improved and responds to the needs of all stakeholders and 3) to facilitate access to effective tools and support so that IATI data contributes to the achievement of sustainable development outcomes.
Why join us as a member?
Demonstrate visionary, international leadership. Membership is a clear statement of commitment to the principles of aid transparency, to implement the IATI standard and help the IATI standard succeed. It brings reputational benefits and provides a forum in which organisations can showcase their work. It also opens up a vibrant network of colleagues for sharing practice and knowledge, collaborating and innovating. IATI’s members are diverse, including civil society, multilateral, donor and partner country governments and private sector organisations from all corners of the world.
Make IATI work for you. Being a member provides the opportunity to shape the future of aid transparency, as IATI is at the forefront of global aid transparency efforts. Members steer the initiative by participating in the annual Members’ Assembly and voting on IATI’s priorities, budget, work plan and changes to the standard. They also share their experience at the Members’ Assembly and in other events to shape the evolution of the IATI open data standard, as a global public good and the architecture of publishing and data use tools that surrounds it.
Be the lifeblood of IATI. Members provide the funding that keeps IATI running. It is essential to maintaining and improving IATI’s technical infrastructure (e.g. Registry, Datastore, D-portal), to providing support for the publication and use of data, and to raising awareness about the contribution of open aid data to achieving the SDGs. It is part of IATI’s DNA for its members to contribute in proportion to their ability: donor members, including bilateral agencies, multilateral organizations and foundations contribute more so that any organization, no matter how small, can publish and use IATI data. Every new publisher increases the value of everyone else’s data, and of the initiative. It is in our common interest to have as many publishers and users of the data as possible, to ensure the technical infrastructure facilitates this and evolves appropriately, and tools to support publishing and using data are developed and freely available. Members make this happen.