Tracking organizational entry and exit across East Africa, 2010–2024
Every country-sector pair in our East African sample shows a dramatic rise in reported active organizations over the past fifteen years. Nowhere has fragmentation declined in a sustained way — despite three major international commitments to reduce it.
But the data carries a confounder that undermines any simple reading: IATI’s own reporter base expanded over the same period. What looks like fragmentation growth may partly — or largely — be fragmentation becoming visible. Distinguishing the two is the central challenge of using IATI for longitudinal fragmentation analysis, and IATI data alone cannot resolve it.
We reconstructed the timeline of active organizations for ten country-sector pairs (five East African countries across governance and health) using IATI activity start and end dates. For each year, we counted distinct reporting organizations with at least one activity that had started but not yet ended.
The pattern is remarkably consistent. Every pair shows growth. Governance sectors grew faster than health: an average of +190% versus +104% over the period.
| Year | Uganda | Kenya | Rwanda | Tanzania | Ethiopia |
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| Year | Uganda | Kenya | Rwanda | Tanzania | Ethiopia |
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The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005), the Accra Agenda for Action (2008), and the Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (2011) all called for reducing fragmentation — fewer actors per sector, better division of labor, more country-led coordination. These commitments produced concrete reform mechanisms: joint programming guidelines, division-of-labor exercises, and mutual accountability frameworks.
In the IATI data, there is no trace of their effect. Not a single country-sector pair shows a decline that coincides with or follows these agreements. At best, some pairs have plateaued since 2020 — which may reflect the end of a reporting-adoption surge as much as any policy impact.
IATI’s membership and active reporter base grew substantially between 2014 and 2020. Organizations that had always operated in these sectors began reporting to IATI during this period. When they appear in the data for the first time, they look like new entrants — organizations arriving in a sector — when they may be incumbents becoming visible.
This creates a fundamental identification problem. If Uganda’s governance sector shows 15 organizations in 2010 and 51 in 2024, some of that increase is genuinely new organizations starting work. Some is existing organizations beginning to report to IATI. And some may be organizations that always reported but whose earlier activities have ended, making them appear as re-entrants. The data cannot distinguish these three sources of growth.
The timing of the growth phase — concentrated between 2015 and 2020 — is suggestive. This aligns closely with the period of fastest IATI adoption, particularly among European bilateral donors and civil society organizations. The 2020 plateau may mark the point where most IATI-reportable organizations had already joined, not a stabilization of actual fragmentation.
Suppose the most pessimistic reading: all the growth is genuine, and fragmentation has in fact doubled or tripled. Even then, the raw trend line overstates the coordination challenge.
As documented in our decomposition analysis, twenty-one percent of the naive organization count in a typical pair is measurement artifact. The remaining organizations are split across distinct thematic domains. Financial concentration is extreme: the top three organizations account for 85–99% of reported disbursements. And coordination mechanisms exist but are invisible in the structured data.
A trend line growing from 10 to 40 organizations represents neither 10 coordination partners becoming 40, nor a fourfold increase in coordination cost. It represents a fourfold increase in a number whose relationship to actual coordination burden is unclear and whose composition changes at every layer of scrutiny.
IATI data quality improvements would unlock longitudinal analysis. Consistent organizational identifiers, a structured “first IATI report date” field, and links to predecessor activities would make it possible to distinguish genuine entry from reporting adoption. Without these, temporal fragmentation analysis carries an unresolvable confounder.
Cross-referencing matters more than more data. The most productive next step is systematic linkage between IATI data and independent sources — the DAC CRS, government aid information management systems, and donor presence databases. Each captures different organizations and different dimensions. Together, they would make the identification problem tractable.
The absence of decline is a finding, not a failure. Whether or not the growth is real, the absence of any sustained decline following the Paris, Accra, and Busan commitments is informative. Either fragmentation reform has not produced measurable results, or the measurement is too noisy to detect them. Both possibilities deserve attention.