IATI data quality in the Pacific

When a donor runs a global or regional programme, they tag every transaction to every country mentioned in the activity — even when the money is explicitly declared for one country. A $100M programme that names 40 countries reports $100M against each country unless the publisher declares percentage splits.

Across the 14 Pacific island countries, 169,628 of 240,417 transactions (70.6%) are for somewhere else. Without correction, this creates absurdities: the US State Department appears as Tonga’s largest funder at $91 billion, when Tonga’s actual declared share of those global programmes is 0.005%.

IATI publishes historical records, not real-time data. Some funders update monthly; others have not published a new transaction in over a year. When a funder’s data goes stale, their spending disappears from any recent-period view — not because they stopped spending, but because they stopped publishing.

15 of 29 funders in the Pacific have data more than a year old. The largest is Australia Aid, the single biggest bilateral funder in 9 of 14 countries, with no transaction dated after 30 June 2025 — a gap of 468 days.

The same aid activity can appear multiple times in IATI when both the funder and the implementing partner publish it. A $50M programme reported by both the donor government and the UN agency implementing it shows up as $100M in a naïve sum.

Across the Pacific, $388M (4.1%) of $9.36B in active spend was identified as potential duplicates in 88 clusters using title matching across publishers (September 2026). This figure is indicative, not a confirmed correction. Title matching cannot distinguish genuine co-financing from duplicate reporting — if two donors contribute $10M and $20M to one programme, the real total may be $30M, not $20M. IATI provides transaction linkages that could help resolve this, and d-portal applies its own secondary-publisher rules. The clusters identify records requiring investigation, not a validated financial correction.

IATI transactions can be negative — representing refunds, adjustments, de-commitments, or corrections. These are legitimate records, but a naïve sum that ignores them will overstate spending, and a system that excludes them will miss real reductions in aid.

2,977 negative transactions appear across the 14 Pacific countries. In Nauru, negative transactions in recent periods can make the 90-day total appear negative — not because aid was withdrawn, but because a prior period’s adjustment was booked in the current window.

A funder who disbursed in the last year but has no transaction in the last 90 days is “quiet” — they are active but invisible in any recent view. This can mean their data is slightly delayed (benign), or it can mean a programme has stalled or been redirected (significant). Without flagging the gap, the 90-day picture silently omits them.

144 quiet funder-country pairs across the region. These are funders who appear in the 365-day totals but are missing from the 90-day view.