Draft Protocol on IATI and NGOs/CSOs for Comment by September 30th

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Background

Since September 2008, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) has been a voluntary multi-stakeholder venue for donors, partner governments, CSOs and other development experts working to make aid spending effectively more transparent in line with the commitment of the Accra Agenda for Action. A milestone in this work came in February 2011, when IATI participants agreed on a common, open, international standard for publishing information about aid. Since then, the IATI standard was endorsed by a number of donors, NGOs and multi-lateral organizations. At the 4th High Level Forum in Busan, the IATI standard achieved recognition in the outcome Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, and has been gaining more individual stakeholder supporters.

• See full list signatories to IATI
• See IATI’s structure and governance
• Visit IATI’s online portal

Civil Society involvement in IATI

For civil society, transparency is a key element of effective development and the basis for accountability, as embodied in the International Framework for CSO Development Effectiveness and the Istanbul Principles therein (see Istanbul Principle 5 - Transparency and Accountability).

Civil society has been engaging actively in the multi-stakeholder IATI process, including as a full participant in the IATI Steering Committee, encouraging donors, civil society and other actors to sign up to the Standard and fully implement it. At the same time, CSOs were interested to identify the implications of the IATI standard implementation for civil society as independent development actors. Indeed, donors are also actively encouraging NGOs to implement the IATI, and it has recently become a condition for NGO funding by DFID in the UK.

Draft CSO Protocol

To clarify these issues, a CSO Working Group operating within the Technical Advisory Group for the IATI process set itself the task of developing a guidance/protocol for 1) CSO Implementation of the Standard and for 2) Donors in their implementation of the Standard as it relates to CSO programming funded by donors.

The Working Group developed the draft Protocol after a review of issues that were brought together in a Background Paper. The Protocol takes up the NGO/CSO commitment to improve CSO transparency and to support the implementation of the IATI Standard in general.

Consultation with CSOs

The draft Protocol is now put for broad consultation with NGOs and CSOs:

Based on the collected input, the CSO working group intends to refine it in mid September for submission to the Steering Committee of IATI at its first meeting in the last quarter of 2012.

Thank you in advance for your input!