FCDO DEVTRACKER INFRASTRUCTURE · IATI
Every pound, on the record.
A public-facing ledger of UK overseas development spending. We rebuilt the platform around IATI.cloud so journalists, parliamentarians and recipient communities can audit every project, document and transaction in seconds — not afternoons.
UK FCDO
Wireframing, UI/UX Design, Prototyping
Django, Apache Solr
2019 – Present
Turn a regulatory obligation into a civic instrument.
FCDO publishes its aid spending to IATI by treaty obligation. Compliance, however, is not the same as legibility. The original tracker met the letter of the law but rarely answered the question a citizen actually arrives with: where did my money go, and what did it do? Our remit was to rebuild that answer — without ever leaving the public record.
Four problems on the desk.
XML at scale
1.2 million IATI activity records, refreshed daily, joined across donors with inconsistent identifiers.
Two audiences
A casual visitor wants a story. A parliamentary researcher wants the source XML. Same page, opposing needs.
GOV.UK ceiling
Visual ambition had to live inside the GOV.UK Design System — no rounded marketing flourishes, no decorative type.
Search latency
Faceted queries over millions of transactions needed to feel instantaneous on a 3G connection in Lilongwe.
A pipeline, not a portal.
IATI.cloud ingestion
Every donor’s XML drops into a single Postgres-backed index nightly, reconciled against organisation IDs so a grant only counts once.
Pre-aggregated rollups
Sector totals, country breakdowns and budget-vs-actual deltas are computed offline so the browser only receives slim JSON.
Faceted search
Filter 12,400+ projects by sector, country, status, or implementing organisation in under 300ms median response.
Financial visuals
Restrained, GOV.UK-compliant charts that translate transaction objects into spending trajectories any reader can follow.
Source documents
Every project page surfaces its underlying IATI activity, programme PDFs and results frameworks — trust survives only when work can be checked.
Country & sector lenses
146 country dashboards and a parallel sector view, so a journalist in Nairobi and a Treasury analyst in London start from the same place.
The default citation for UK aid.
DevTracker now serves National Audit Office reviews, IDC parliamentary hearings, and the working files of every major UK development NGO. Each release narrows the distance between a line item in the Treasury and a school built somewhere it is needed.
The numbers behind the platform.
£15.2B
Tracked annually
12,400+
Active projects
146
Recipient countries
< 300ms
Median query time
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