IATI DATASTORE OPEN DATA · AID TRANSPARENCY
The central source of truth for global aid data.
Zimmerman has built and maintained the IATI Datastore since 2018 — a unified, queryable hub that ingests, validates and republishes activity data from 1,500+ aid publishers worldwide.
IATI Secretariat
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.
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.
Query Builder UI
A visual interface so non-developers can ask questions of the data directly.
Validation feedback
Publishers see exactly why a file was rejected, with line-level errors.
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 query builder to raw API.
Query Builder
Pick fields, filters and output format — get a shareable URL.
API Explorer
Live OpenAPI docs. Try requests directly in the browser.
Flexible Downloads
Download valid IATI data in XML, JSON, CSV or Excel-ready CSV.
“The Datastore is the spine of the IATI ecosystem. Building it isn’t a one-off project — it’s a commitment to keep aid data accurate, accessible and trusted, year after year.”
Zimmerman · IATI Datastore engineering team
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