As pioneers in transparency of aid spending, EMMS looks to expand its fundraising potential

In this new regular blog, EMMS CEO, Cathy Ratcliff welcomes new staff and reflects on pioneering work with former colleagues.

Some of our supporters and partners may have noticed how busy we’ve been in EMMS lately – though this is no different from usual! We’ve been welcoming two new senior staff, Elaine and Vanessa, beginning to scale up our Communications to boost our Fundraising as we adapt to the end of UK Aid Match, and generally keeping up with all our work while staff take turns to have their summer holidays.

New staff, of course, often replace others who are leaving, and in this case, our long-standing Communications consultant, Gary, has been handing over his work to our new Director of Communications, Elaine. Gary was our Head of Communications in Edinburgh from 2012 to 2018, and then became our part-time Communications consultant based in Malawi, covering other countries as well.

Part of Gary’s handover to Elaine will be our quarterly report to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). While many of our stakeholders will not have heard of IATI, it is an important aspect of work that goes on behind the scenes at EMMS to maintain our high standards and professionalism.

So what is IATI? It sounds obscure, but it’s an important way in which international donors and charities honour our commitment to transparency. Officially IATI is described as “a global initiative to improve the transparency of development and humanitarian resources and their results for addressing poverty and crises.” In practice, it means that anyone who is interested is able to “follow the money” from payments made by government donors to actual spend on the ground.

IATI started soon after Gary and I started in EMMS in 2012. Gary and I embraced the transparency concept enthusiastically and set about making EMMS a pioneer in IATI. We attended meetings in London on IATI and provided recommendations from an inputter's perspective. At its start, IATI was quite basic, and we relied on Gary’s abilities in computer coding to input our data!

By 2015, we had made EMMS the 11th most comprehensive publisher in the world, and we published in 4 languages. The IATI annual report of 2015 has a box about EMMS on page 45 (electronic page 23). As fully comprehensive publishers, we publish our spend on each of our projects, and the source of their funding where that is a government, every quarter. When this became a contractual requirement in 2022 for grantees like us of the UK Government, we were happily already compliant. We still publish quarterly to IATI, maintaining the high standards to which the UK Government held us.

Gary has been a reliable stalwart of EMMS, with great knowledge and understanding of all our work. We could not have managed without Gary, and for that we all owe him a real debt of gratitude. I wish him all the very best in his new job back in Scotland.

And I am, of course, delighted to welcome Elaine and Vanessa, our new Directors of Communications and Fundraising, respectively. I hope that they will have a long and happy time in EMMS. We are fortunate to have found two such well qualified and well experienced professionals in their fields. I can’t wait to see what a difference they will make for us.

Thank you as ever to all our supporters, especially in what is for all international charities, a time of transition.

With best wishes,

Cathy