Iati Datastore MCP server

@pipeworx/iati-datastore

International aid activities (IATI Datastore) — search every published aid and development activity worldwide by country, sector, donor or keyword, and read the individual commitments and disbursements behind it.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Tools

• iatisearchactivities({ query, country, sector, reportingOrg, limit, offset, _apiKey }) — activities matching a Solr query, with convenience filters.
• iatiactivity({ iatiIdentifier, apiKey }) — the full record for one activity.
• iatitransactions({ iatiIdentifier, query, transactionType, limit, offset, apiKey }) — the money actually moved: commitments vs disbursements, with dates and counterparties.

Auth

Platform key (PLATFORMIATIKEY) with BYO override via ?_apiKey=; sent upstream as an Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key header. Free self-service registration at — sign up, then subscribe to the "IATI Datastore API" product. No manual approval step.

Data sources

• — activity index.
• — transaction index.

IATI is the standard donor governments, UN agencies, development banks and large NGOs publish their aid spending to; the Datastore is the single queryable index over all of it.

Traps

default field only and quietly matches little; prefer an explicit field (titlenarrative:water, recipientcountrycode:KE). Every response echoes querysent so you can see what actually ran.

• query is Apache Solr syntax, not free text. A bare word searches the

reports transaction-level detail, so an empty iati_transactions result is often a publisher gap, not a query error.

• An activity with a budget may have no transactions. Not every publisher

field name across documents — the mapping normalises both.

• Solr multi-valued fields come back as arrays and scalars do not, for the same

envelope (response.numFound / response.docs) is stable; document field names come from the published IATI field reference, and every tool returns raw so a caller with a real key is never blocked by a stale name here.

• The populated payload is unverified — no fleet key exists. The Solr

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "iati-datastore": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/iati-datastore/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/iati-datastore/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1679+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.