International Aid Transparency Initiative

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) aims to improve the transparency, accountability, and effectiveness of international aid. It makes aid-related information easier to find, use and compare.

Donor countries, developing country governments and non-governmental organisations who sign on to IATI commit to publishing information on international assistance that is more timely and comprehensive.

Canada joined IITA in 2011, through the former CIDA, and began publishing data formatted according to the IATI Standard and its implementation schedule in 2012. Finance Canada and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) released their first IATI data sets in 2015. As a result, about 90% of Canada’s official development assistance is now available in the IATI standard.

The IATI standard uses codes instead of words to simplify data manipulation. For example, we use the country code “PE” rather than “Peru” and “Pérou”. Find out what the codes mean in the IATI codelists.

You can access all IATI data through the IATI Registry and the following tools:

• D-Portal.org for simple searches
• IATI Datastore a query builder for more extensive research

In these tools, the term "publishers" refer to the institutions that input the data. Use the publisher identifier “CA-3” to access data from Global affairs Canada.

Some of the data from Global Affairs Canada’s IATI activity files are used in our international assistance projects repository (Project Browser).

Global Affairs Canada IATI files

Global Affairs Canada (GAC) publishes the three following files to help ease data analysis.

Two activity files published every business day and organized by project status (implementation, finalisation, and closed):

• GAC IATI Activity File– Implementation and finalisation status (.XML file)
• GAC IATI Activity File– Closed status (.XML file)

These files provide information about international assistance projects such as:

• titles
• descriptions
• implementing partners
• results expected and achieved
• sectors
• policy markers
• planned and actual disbursements
• links to related documents
• which countries or regions benefit from the projects

For more information about the files, refer to the Data field definitions page.

For information on policy markers used in these files, refer to GAC Specific Policy Markers (.CSV file)

One Organisation file published on a monthly basis:

• GAC IATI Organisation File (.XML file)

This file provides department-level information such as:

• GAC’s annual forward planning budget
• planned country-programmable aid spending by country
• approved commitments to key partner organizations
• links to key documents, such as strategic plans, evaluations and reports.

Related links

• Open Government Partnership
• Publish What You Fund