What IATI data can and can’t see about aid coordination — and why the gap matters more than fragmentation counts.
IATI was built to solve a coordination problem. Two decades later, its data standard has structured fields designed to make coordination visible: collaboration types, basket fund codes, multi-funder activity records. We checked whether those fields actually get filled.
IATI activities can record four participating organization roles — Funding, Implementing, Extending, and Accountable — plus structured codes for collaboration type and aid type (including basket funds and sector budget support). If consistently filled, these fields would make coordination programmatically queryable.
Across 4,756 active activities in ten East African country-sector pairs, completion drops sharply for the roles most relevant to coordination.
The Funding organization — who pays — is filled 91% of the time. The Accountable organization — who is responsible when multiple parties work together — is filled for barely one in four activities. The field designed to answer “who coordinates?” is the least likely to be answered.
And the multi-funder capability — the ability to list more than one funding organization on a single activity, which would directly show donor coordination — was used in exactly zero of 4,756 activities.
If structured fields undercount coordination, can we find it in activity titles and descriptions instead? We searched for five categories of coordination language: pooled funding, joint programming, sector-wide approaches, donor coordination, and harmonization.
Only 3.3% of activities mention coordination keywords. Combining keyword search with structured-field detection (aid type B03/B04/A02, multilateral collaboration type) finds coordination signals in 644 of 4,756 activities — 13.5%. But the two methods barely overlap.
| Pair | Structured only | Both | Keywords only | Total signals | % keyword-only |
|---|
Across all ten pairs, 98 activities with coordination keywords were invisible to structured-field queries. These are joint programmes, pooled funds, and donor coordination mechanisms that describe themselves as such in plain text — but aren’t coded that way in the fields designed to capture them.
The coordination signals vary enormously across pairs. Tanzania Health shows 37 keyword coordination signals — seven times more than Kenya Health. Ethiopia Health reports 98 basket fund activities — twelve times more than Uganda Health.
These differences primarily reflect which organizations report to IATI and how thoroughly they fill fields, not how much coordination actually happens. The data varies too much across reporters to support cross-country comparison of coordination intensity.
| Pair | Collab type | Aid type | Basket fund acts | Keyword signals | Shared implementers |
|---|
Several well-documented coordination mechanisms in East Africa are largely invisible in IATI data:
Basket funds and SWAps — Uganda’s JLOS SWAp, Tanzania’s health basket fund, Rwanda’s donor coordination groups. These exist and are documented outside IATI, but each reporting organization records its contribution as a separate activity. The coordinated entity has no representation in the data.
Government-led coordination — sector working groups, development partner meetings, joint sector reviews. These are the backbone of aid coordination in practice. They leave no trace in IATI because they aren’t “activities” with budgets.
Informal coordination — geographic division of labor, thematic specialization, bilateral information sharing. By definition invisible in reporting.
IATI data can reliably identify two things about coordination: whether an activity uses a pooled funding mechanism (when the aid-type code is properly filled), and how many organizations report activity in a given sector. The first is a narrow structural indicator. The second is a fragmentation proxy, not a coordination measure.
It cannot reliably show whether donors in the same sector are coordinating or duplicating, whether fragmentation has improved over time, or whether the Paris/Accra/Busan commitments have changed behavior.
This is not a criticism of IATI. The standard was designed for transparency — making individual activities visible — not for coordination measurement. But the distinction matters. Studies that use IATI data to measure aid coordination are measuring data completeness and reporting practice, not coordination itself.
For practitioners: the gap is not a data problem but a coordination-information problem. The mechanisms that matter most — sector working groups, joint reviews, informal division of labor — don’t naturally fit into activity-level reporting. A complementary coordination-specific data standard might be more productive than trying to extract coordination signals from activity data.