The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) aims to make information about aid spending easier to find, compare and use. This means those involved in aid programmes will be able to better track how aid money is being spent and what it is achieving.

Interested parties range from taxpayers in donor countries, to those in developing countries who benefit from aid. Improving transparency also helps governments in developing countries manage aid more effectively. This means that all funds used will go as far as possible towards fighting poverty.

UNOPS delivers more than $1.2 billion worth of projects on behalf of its partners each year in more than 80 countries, supporting them in their peacebuilding, humanitarian and development efforts.

Jan Mattsson, Executive Director of UNOPS said: “We are committed to increasing the level of transparency and accountability in our work and living up to the IATI principles set out in the Accra Statement and the Framework for Implementation.

“On our public website unops.org, we are already publishing details of the 1,000 projects that we are implementing, along with their budgets and spending. We are determined to go further, and by adopting the IATI standards we hope to make this information even more accessible.

“I applaud IATI's efforts to create common standards and formats that allow the many actors in the field to present information in a way that can be more easily understood and analysed,” he added.

UNOPS is the 21st signatory to the IATI and joins, among others, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the European Commission, and The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Many donor countries, such as the UK, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain are also signatories as are many developing countries. A full list can be found here.

UNOPS has begun publishing information in the IATI format and is among the first organizations to do so. This will mean making raw data about our projects available in an open-source, machine-readable file. This will allow users to take the information and analyse it as they wish, combining and comparing it with data from other organizations which have implemented IATI standards.