About this site

This site allows you to access data on funding provided by development partners to the health sector. Many organisations have begun publishing their data to IATI, the International Aid Transparency Intiative (IATI). This includes bilateral and mutilateral donors, multilateral development banks, UN agencies, philanthropic foundations and non-governmental organisations.

The raw data is published by each organisation on their own website, in the IATI-XML format. Various IATI tools then package the data to make it easier to access. This tool provides several additional transformations to make the data useful for the health sector:

• it extracts only health sector spending
• it maps the data provided by DPs against countries’ own budget classifications
• it provides a series of pivot tables which make it easy to analyse and understand the data.

Datasets are generated once per day for each country.

For more information on the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), visit IATI’s website.

Why might IATI data be useful?

Countries need an overview of all the actors in the health sector in order to ensure an effective allocation and use of scarce resources.

Existing resource mapping and expenditure tracking processes are often slow and costly, and only cover a limited subset of projects. The resulting datasets can be difficult to keep up to date.

Through IATI, a range of development partners provide very detailed and timely data. IATI provides a mechanism for countries to access the data published directly by the DP -- the original source of data is the DP, which makes this an authoritative source.

Why might IATI data not be useful?

As each DP is responsible for publishing its own data, there may be gaps in coverage, or other issues in the quality of data published. However, addressing these issues will most likely lead to systematic improvements in the quality of data published. This therefore represents a good investment of time, compareed to the ongoing cost of manually collecting data direclty from DPs.

How to validate data

(1) Select a local data source

The appropriate data source would depend on data availability at country level, and the sorts of systems which are available. There could be a range of different data sources for locally/manually collected data:

• Most recent RMET exercise
• AIMS or similar data collection system
• Data provided directly by DPs

(2) Ensure data is comparable

Next, it is important to ensure that the data is comparable in terms of:

• time period -- e.g. 2025 IATI data should be compared with manually collected data
• coverage -- e.g. IATI health data should be compared with manually collected data only for the health sector

(3) Compare data sources by a range of different dimensions

Countries should compare the two data sources according to the following dimensions:

1. Comprehensiveness: which are the top N (e.g. 10) development partners in your country? Compare total amount spent in the most recent available year / next year with amounts published in IATI.
2. Timeliness: how frequently do you receive data from development partners? How frequently do those development partners update their data in IATI?
3. Project-level totals: compare total amounts for the largest N (e.g. 10) projects with the data available locally.
4. Forward-looking data: compare total (project-level) spending for next 1-3 years.