IATI.CLOUD OPEN DATA · AID TRANSPARENCY
The central source of truth for global aid data.
Zimmerman built and managed the IATI Datastore (2018–2020), now maintained as IATI.Cloud — the data backbone of AIDA, MFA Openaid.fi, and FCDO DevTracker.
Formerly developed for the IATI Secretariat, currently in use by AIDA, Finland's MFA, and the UK's FCDO.
System Architecture, Data Engineering, UX/UI
Apache Solr, Python/Django, REST API
2018 – Present
One queryable home for the world’s aid data.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is the global open standard for publishing development and humanitarian resource flows. Hundreds of governments, NGOs, multilaterals and foundations publish activity data as IATI XML — but for users on the ground, that scattered data is hard to access, compare and trust.
The IATI Datastore is the official solution: a single API and querying interface that fetches, validates and republishes every IATI activity in formats that researchers, journalists, ministries and tooling can actually use.
Zimmerman has been the implementation partner since the platform's ground-up rebuild in 2018, and continues to operate, evolve and support it as IATI's core piece of public infrastructure, extending it’s use to various other client projects such as Finland’s MFA, and the UK’s FCDO.
Aid transparency only works if the data does.
Fragmented publishing
1,500+ publishers, each hosting their own XML at their own URL, on their own schedule.
Inconsistent quality
Schemas drift, codelists evolve, files break. Raw IATI XML is rarely usable as-is.
Hard to query
Answering a simple question — ‘Who funded what, where, when?’ — required scraping the whole network.
Trust at scale
As a public good, the Datastore must be correct, reproducible and continuously available.
What the Datastore does.
Apache Solr index
Sub-second queries across millions of activities, transactions and budgets.
Public REST API
Documented endpoints with paging, filtering and faceting for every IATI element.
JSON · XML · CSV
One query, three formats. Built for analysts, developers and spreadsheets alike.
Currency Conversion
Uses date-bound XDR conversion rates to convert reported monetary values to USD and GBP.
Indexing feedback
If a dataset could not be indexed, IATI.cloud is able to show its internal reasoning.
Continuous ingestion
Scheduled crawls and incremental updates keep the index fresh by the hour.
Versioned codelists
Full support for evolving IATI standard versions, side by side.
Open source
Every component is public on GitHub — auditable, reproducible, forkable.
From raw API to valuable insights.
Originally built for the IATI Secretariat, IATI.cloud now powers platforms including AIDA, MFA Finland's Openaid.fi, and FCDO's DevTracker.
"Reliable infrastructure is what keeps IATI data usable. Ours has been running, and improving, for years."
Zimmerman · IATI.Cloud engineering team
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