Last night, while speaking at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan Korea, Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda announced that Canada would be signing on to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI).

So what is IATI and why does this matter?

IATI has developed a common, open and international standard for sharing foreign aid data. By signing on to IATI Canada is agreeing to publish all the data about its projects and who it funds in a form and structure that makes it easy to compare with others who use the IATI standard. This should make it easier to understand where Canadian aid money ends up, in turn allowing analysts to spot efficiencies as well as compare funding and efforts across donor and recipient countries as well as other stakeholders. In short, aid data should become easier to understand, to compare, and to use.

In the medium term it should also make the data available on CIDA’s open data portal (already helpful to non-profits, development groups and students) even more useful.

This is an enormous win for the good people at Engineers Without Borders, as well as the team at Publish What You Fund. Both groups have been working hard for over a year talking Canadian politicians and public servants through the ins and outs – as well as the benefits – of signing onto IATI. I’ve been working with both groups as well, pushing IATI when meeting with Federal Ministers (I recommended we make it part of our Open Government Partnership goals) as well as writing supportive op-eds in newspapers, so needless to say I’m excited about this development.

This really is good news. As governments become increasingly aware of the power data can have in facilitating cooperation and coordination as well as in improving effectiveness and efficiency, it will be critical to push standards around structuring and sharing data so that such coordination can happen easily across and between jurisdictions. IATI is a great example of such an effort and I hope there are more of these, with Canada taking an early lead, in the months and years ahead.