Methodology & Data

What ATLAS measures

ATLAS profiles the Canadian organizations active in international cooperation across the period covered by the dashboard (2015 to 2023). Year-by-year counts of active organizations are shown on the Overview and Organizations pages and update with every data refresh. The sector is defined as Canadian civil society and non-governmental organizations working internationally to address poverty, inequality, human rights, humanitarian crises, and environmental and climate challenges.

The geographic scope includes countries and regions eligible for Official Development Assistance (ODA) under OECD/DAC criteria, as well as global and regional initiatives that primarily benefit those countries.

The dashboard draws primarily from two open-government data sources:

• CRA T3010 charitable filings: annual returns of Canadian charities (revenue, expenditure breakdown, staffing).
• GAC Historical Projects Dataset (HPDS): Government of Canada disbursements to development and humanitarian projects (project-level country and sector detail).

Most organizations appear in both datasets. Smaller charities that do not receive significant GAC funding contribute primarily to the revenue and expenditure analysis, while organizations such as universities and research institutions may appear only through GAC project data. Where charitable reporting is unavailable, GAC disbursement data is used to estimate international cooperation activity.

How figures are computed

Constant 2023 Canadian dollars

All monetary values in the dashboard and downloadable datasets are adjusted to constant 2023 Canadian dollars using the Statistics Canada Consumer Price Index (annual average for Canada). This allows comparisons across years to reflect real change rather than inflation.

Canadian civil society only (GAC side)

The GAC Historical Projects Dataset published by the Government of Canada also contains disbursements to multilaterals, foreign organizations, federal departments, and for-profit consultants. ATLAS retains only the activities flowing to Canadian non-profit civil-society organizations, so GAC totals shown here are smaller than the totals published by GAC itself.

Official Development Assistance only

Project activities are kept only if they qualify as Official Development Assistance (ODA) under DAC criteria. Non-ODA flows (such as private-sector instruments) are excluded.

50% geographic rule

Country-level allocations can come from either CRA charitable filings or GAC project data. For each organization, ATLAS picks one of the two sources based on the share of total revenue coming from GAC in 2023: below 50% the CRA Schedule 2 data is used (it is usually more complete for those organizations), at 50% or above the GAC project data is used. Geographic allocations are most reliable from 2019 onward, when CRA reporting became more complete.

Thematic coefficients

For thematic analyses (gender equality, climate, health, etc.), each project amount is weighted to reflect how central the theme is to the project. A project for which the theme is the principal objective counts at 100%; a project for which it is a significant but secondary objective counts at a lower share (50% for gender equality, 30% for biodiversity, disability, indigenous and child issues). For climate, a matrix avoids double-counting when both mitigation and adaptation are principal on the same project.

Consortium disbursements

When the Government of Canada funds a consortium of several Canadian organizations as a single activity, the disbursement is split equally among the named partners so that each organization receives credit for its share, not the full activity amount.

Large foundations

The Mastercard Foundation operates at a scale substantially larger than other foundations included in the dataset. To prevent this scale from overwhelming sector-wide averages and trend analysis, ATLAS presents foundation data separately in selected charts and summaries.

Per-year vs cumulative

Charts default to a single fiscal year (2023). The same organization may appear in some years and not others — a smaller charity missing a CRA filing in a specific year, or a project-based group only active when GAC funding is flowing. For trend analysis across years, charts use a stable panel of the organizations that filed a CRA T3010 return in every year of the covered period, so that growth or decline reflects actual change in those organizations rather than churn in the dataset.

Classifications

Each organization is assigned to one of seven categories — Canadian NGO, INGO, Faith-Based, University / College, Institution, Association, or Platform — plus Foundation, which is profiled separately on the Foundations page. Categories appear consistently in legends and filter pickers.

Known limitations

Indigenous organizations

Very few Indigenous-led organizations could be confidently identified in the available CRA and GAC datasets through 2023. As a result, ATLAS does not fully capture Indigenous-led international cooperation activity.

Diaspora organizations

Diaspora-led organizations are not separately identifiable in the underlying public datasets. Their limited visibility in ATLAS reflects a data limitation, not their importance within the sector.

Pre-2019 country detail

Country-level reporting in CRA Schedule 2 filings was incomplete for many organizations before 2019. Geographic trends for earlier years should therefore be interpreted with caution.

Provincial funding before 2016/17

GAC’s Historical Projects Dataset began including provincial-government funding in 2016/17. As a result, totals for 2015/16 are not fully comparable with later years.

Public engagement and global education

Public engagement and global education activities carried out in Canada are difficult to capture in the available financial data, so the dashboard only partially reflects this dimension of the sector’s work.

Indirect impacts and benefits

ATLAS describes the size, composition, and financial flows of the sector. It does not measure the indirect impacts or wider benefits of international cooperation, which fall outside what administrative financial data can capture.

Funding channels and cross-border transfers

Some funding channels and cross-border transfers are only partially visible in the source data. For example, funds raised in Canada by international NGOs (INGOs) and transferred to affiliated entities or partners abroad may not be fully reflected.

Actors outside CRA and GAC data

ATLAS is built from CRA and GAC datasets. Organizations and actors that do not appear in either source — including the Indigenous and diaspora organizations noted above — are not fully represented.

Single-organization views

ATLAS is designed to show sector-wide patterns and trends. Individual organization profiles may not reflect the full scope of an organization’s activities, finances, or partnerships; users should consult organizational reports for complete context.

For additional detail on definitions, data sources, calculations, and methodological decisions, open the Full methodology tab above or download the PDF version.

Data coverage

Every figure in this dashboard comes from one of two complementary public datasets — CRA T3010 charitable filings (the annual return Canadian charities submit to the Canada Revenue Agency, the source of revenue and expenditure breakdowns) and GAC HPDS (the Global Affairs Canada Historical Projects Dataset, the source of project-level disbursements and country allocations). Most organizations appear in both sources; some only file with the CRA (typically smaller charities not funded by the federal program), and some are GAC-funded but file no T3010 (typically universities, colleges, and public institutions exempt from charitable reporting).

The chart below shows that split year by year from 2015 to 2023. Each line tracks one coverage group — CRA only, CRA + GAC, and GAC only — so the reader can see whether the composition of the active panel is stable across the period or shifts as new organizations enter and others wind down. This year-by-year view also serves as a stability check for the 50%-geographic rule: any pronounced movement in the CRA + GAC or GAC only lines indicates that the rule’s routing distribution would shift if the analytical reference year changed.

Coverage of the GAC dataset

In any given year, roughly half of the organizations active that year have at least one Global Affairs Canada activity. The GAC-side analyses (sector allocations, thematic markers, country detail) are built from this sub-group, not from the full panel of organizations. Year-specific coverage rates are shown on the Overview page and update with every data refresh.

Coverage is significantly higher among larger organizations: the great majority of large and very large organizations appear in the GAC dataset, and those organizations together account for the large majority of total sector revenue. Thematic and sectoral charts therefore reflect the bulk of sector spending even though they cover only about half of the organizations by count.

Sector definition

For the ATLAS dashboard, the Canadian international cooperation sector is defined as the diversity of Canadian civil society and non-governmental organizations working across borders to address global challenges of poverty, inequality, human rights, economic development, conflict, environmental destruction, and climate change at the country or regional level. It also includes Canadian non-governmental organizations focused on global education and public engagement in international cooperation, although suitable data on those activities is not yet available.

The geographic scope is countries in the global south, defined by the OECD Development Assistance Committee as eligible for ODA, plus global and regional programs of significant benefit to those countries.

Data sources

ATLAS draws on two open-source government datasets:

CRA T3010 charitable returns

Annual filings registered with the Canada Revenue Agency. Provides full revenue breakdown by source (receipted donations, government revenue, gifts, etc.), expenditure categories (charitable programs, administration, fundraising), and staffing.

GAC Historical Projects Dataset (HPDS)

Annual disbursements for development and humanitarian project activities financed by the Government of Canada and (from 2016/17 onward) provincial governments and other federal departments. The 2015/16 file contains only flows from Global Affairs Canada itself, which makes that year not fully comparable with later years. Covers fiscal years 2015/16 through 2023/24.

Fiscal-year convention

Throughout ATLAS, a fiscal year is labelled by its starting calendar year. The GAC fiscal year 2015/16 is shown as 2015; a CRA fiscal period ending 2024-03-31 is shown as 2024. Researchers comparing figures with the original publications should keep this convention in mind.

DAC List of ODA Recipients

The geographic scope follows the OECD DAC List of ODA Recipients, version 2022/23, applied year-by-year. Each country’s eligibility reflects its status in the relevant fiscal year, so a country that has graduated from the list (for example Chile in 2017, Antigua and Barbuda in 2021) appears only up to its graduation year.

Building the organization list

ATLAS does not start from a pre-existing master roster. The list of in-scope Canadian organizations is built up from four membership networks — Cooperation Canada, the Provincial Councils, Kentro Christian Network, and CanWaCH — combined with every Canadian organization that received a Global Affairs Canada disbursement in any year covered by the dataset. The initial scan yields roughly 500 organizations.

This long list is then refined through a structured review:

• each organization's public-facing website is checked to confirm that international cooperation is a primary objective rather than incidental to a broader Canadian mandate;
• each entry is matched to its CRA Business Number and (where applicable) its GAC organizational identifier, which are the identifiers used to link it back to the T3010 and HPDS data;
• duplicates, organizations with no CRA or GAC information, organizations that are not Canadian charities, and organizations whose international activities are residual are removed.

The result is a stable roster of organizations across the period; current counts (cumulative and active-in-reference-year) are displayed on the Overview and Organizations pages and update with every data refresh. The roster splits into three coverage profiles, which determine which charts each organization can populate:

• Full CRA + GAC — revenue and expenditure breakdowns plus sector, country, and policy-marker detail. The bulk of the dashboard is built from this group.
• CRA only — full T3010 financial detail but no GAC programming detail. These organizations contribute to revenue, expenditure, and provincial-distribution charts but not to sector, country, or thematic-marker views.
• GAC only — typically universities, colleges, and institutions exempt from charitable reporting. For these organizations GAC disbursements are taken as a proxy for revenue dedicated to international cooperation, since their CRA filings (when they exist) cover much broader Canadian operations. The 50% geographic rule (see below) is the formal expression of this principle.

The roster is reviewed and refreshed each time a new fiscal year of CRA or GAC data is published.

Organization classifications

Every organization on the roster is assigned to a single classification. The labels appear throughout the dashboard — in legends, filter pickers, and breakdowns — and carry the meanings below.

Association

Membership-based organization.

Canadian NGO

Canadian non-governmental organization whose primary mandate is international cooperation.

INGO (International NGO affiliate)

Canadian affiliate with a direct organizational relationship to a formal international NGO network.

Faith-Based

Organization whose identity, mission, or activities are explicitly shaped by religious or spiritual beliefs, values, or affiliations.

Foundation

Trust constituted and operated exclusively for charitable purposes, usually funded and controlled by a single individual, family, or corporation. The Mastercard Foundation is profiled separately because of its scale — see the Foundations section.

Institution

Formal Canadian organization with a social, educational, economic, or public purpose, often with a partial focus on international cooperation.

Platform

Canadian membership-based organization whose members' focus is on international cooperation. Includes the Provincial Councils.

University / College

Formal Canadian education institution with an identifiable international cooperation programme.

Two further groups are present in the data but not tracked as standalone classifications — Canadian First Nations, Inuit and Métis governments and organizations are largely undocumented in the source datasets, and Canadian diaspora organizations are not separately flagged. See Known limitations for context on both.

Per-year vs cumulative scope

An organization is considered active in a given year if it filed a CRA T3010 return that year or received a GAC disbursement that year. Charts that report a count of organizations — on the Overview, the Organizations page, or in any caption — show only the organizations active in the displayed year, not the cumulative roster across all years.

This avoids overstating sector size. Over the period covered by the dashboard, several hundred organizations have appeared in the dataset at some point, but only a subset are active in any given year.

Why organization counts vary

Organization counts shift between years because the same organization may appear in some years but not others — not because the universe is unstable. As a result, aggregate dollar trends across the period can be misleading; they reflect different organizational populations.

For example, the per-year total can fluctuate by several dozen organizations across the years covered — fewer organizations were captured in the earliest year than in more recent years. The Organizations page chart counts reflect only orgs active in the year being viewed.

Revenue breakdown — CRA only

Detailed revenue source analysis (receipted donations, government revenue, revenue from outside Canada, etc.) is only possible for organizations with CRA T3010 filings — typically a few hundred organizations in any given year.

Organizations without a T3010 — universities, colleges and institutions for which international cooperation is only part of a broader mandate, along with many NGOs and other non-profits — do not provide a source breakdown. For those organizations, GAC disbursements are treated as a revenue proxy and booked entirely as government revenue. This makes total sector revenue defensible while keeping the source breakdown honest about where the data comes from.

Because Associations, Institutions, and Platforms have very few organizations with CRA data, detailed revenue and expenditure analysis is generally limited to Canadian NGOs, INGOs, and Faith-Baseds.

The 50% geographic rule

Country-level expenditure data can come from two places: an organization's CRA T3010 Schedule 2 ("Activities outside Canada") or its GAC project records. Coverage and quality differ between the two, so ATLAS uses a deterministic rule to choose, applied per organization:

• If GAC funding represents less than 50% of an organization's total revenue in 2023, ATLAS uses CRA Schedule 2 data (assumed to be more complete than GAC alone for that org).
• If GAC funding represents 50% or more, ATLAS uses GAC HPDS data.
• Organizations not in the GAC HPDS use CRA data.
• Organizations with no CRA data use GAC data.

Country and regional allocations are reliable from 2019 onward; CRA Schedule 2 was incomplete for many organizations before then.

Things to keep in mind when reading the geographic charts

• The 50% test is calculated on the reference year (2023) alone, not on a multi-year average. An organization whose revenue share from GAC fluctuates can switch from one source to the other from one annual update to the next.
• The rule applies to country-by-organization analyses on the Geography page. The thematic-by-country views (gender by country, climate by country, etc.) are built from GAC project data exclusively, because there is no equivalent of policy markers in CRA filings.
• Universities and colleges are treated under the GAC branch by default, because their CRA filings rarely separate international activities from domestic ones. One institution is currently treated as a documented exception (it has sufficiently complete CRA Schedule 2 data to be used directly).

Sectoral and thematic markers — GAC only

Sectoral allocations (DAC sector codes) and thematic markers (gender equality, climate adaptation, RMNCH, biodiversity, disabilities, child issues, indigenous issues, food security) are calculated from GAC HPDS data only. In any given year, only a portion of the sector receives GAC funding (roughly half), and those disbursements typically represent only a fraction of those organizations' overall revenue and a smaller share of total sector revenue.

This means thematic and sectoral charts capture programming financed by the Government of Canada and not necessarily an organization's full programming portfolio. In aggregate the data still gives a reasonable proxy for sector priorities.

How thematic amounts are calculated

For policy markers where a theme is a secondary objective rather than the principal one (for example, gender equality in an agriculture project), a coefficient is applied to estimate the share of the disbursement attributable to that theme. The coefficients used by ATLAS are:

Gender equality

Principal objective — 100% of the disbursement counted toward gender. Significant (but secondary) objective — 50%. Not targeted — 0%. The higher weighting on «significant» (compared with the other markers below) reflects the central place gender equality has in the Government of Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy.

Biodiversity, disability issues, indigenous issues, child issues

Principal objective — 100%. Significant objective — 30%. Not targeted — 0%.

Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH)

GAC uses a finer five-step scale for RMNCH. The coefficients are 0% / 25% / 50% / 75% / 100% as the marker goes from «not targeted» to «principal objective». RMNCH and Nutrition markers exist only from fiscal year 2017/18 onward.

Climate (mitigation and adaptation)

An anti-double-counting matrix is applied so that mitigation and adaptation are not both fully credited on the same activity:

Mitigation marker	Adaptation marker	Mitigation %	Adaptation %
Principal	Not targeted or significant	100%	0% or 30%
Principal	Principal	50%	50%
Not targeted or significant	Principal	0% or 30%	100%
Significant	Not targeted	30%	0%
Significant	Significant	15%	15%
Not targeted	Not targeted	0%	0%

The 15% / 15% cell halves the weight when both markers are significant, so a single project that is significant for both ends up counted at 30% in total instead of 60% — the same overall weight as if it had been significant for one marker alone.

Food security

Food security is not a DAC policy marker. ATLAS counts an activity as food-security if its DAC sector code falls into Basic Nutrition (12240), Food Assistance (52010), Emergency Food Assistance (72040), or any code in the Agriculture range (31110–31195). The coefficient is binary: an activity is either fully counted or not counted at all.

Humanitarian vs development

The humanitarian-vs-development split shown on the dashboard is derived from the DAC sector code of each activity, not from a separate «humanitarian» flag. An activity counts as humanitarian if its DAC sector code falls under Emergency Response (72000-series), Reconstruction Relief and Rehabilitation (73000-series), or Disaster Prevention and Preparedness (74000-series). Everything else counts as development. This produces a definition that is consistent across all years and consistent with DAC’s own classification, but it can differ slightly from totals built on GAC’s own humanitarian field.

Multi-sector and multi-country projects

When a project spans several sectors and several countries, ATLAS allocates the project amount across each (sector, country) pair using the standard IATI convention: the share for a given pair is the sector percentage multiplied by the country percentage. From 2017/18 onward this combined percentage is published directly by GAC; for earlier years ATLAS computes it from the two component percentages so that historical and recent years are treated consistently.

Theme → DAC code mapping

For every high-level theme used by the dashboard (Global Health, Education, Climate, etc.), the table below shows which official OECD/DAC sector codes feed it and with what weighting factor (1.00 = full, 0.50 = split). The mapping is pulled live from the ATLAS reference data, so any update to the canonical theme ↔ code relationships is reflected here without a re-publish.

DAC sector codes catalogue

Every leaf-level OECD/DAC purpose code recognised by the dashboard, tagged with the level-1 broad sector it rolls up to. The parent column lets you trace a chart slice back from a five-digit purpose code to its canonical group. The catalogue is pulled live from the ATLAS reference data; the parent relationship follows the official HPDS hierarchy (every project row pairs a level-2 code with its level-1 parent).

Foundations

Foundations are profiled separately rather than mixed in with the rest of the sector. They rely on assets, not annual revenue, to fund their international cooperation activities, so combining their reported revenue with charity revenue would distort sector averages and trends.

ATLAS currently includes four foundations active in international cooperation:

• Mastercard Foundation (Ontario) — profiled separately because of its scale; see the outlier handling section below.
• Ken and Oli Johnstone Foundation (British Columbia).
• Tula Foundation (British Columbia) — visible through GAC project data only.
• ERDO — Emergency Relief and Development Overseas (Ontario) — registered but inactive (nil filings), so it carries no financial data.

Foundations are therefore excluded from all sector-wide aggregates and trends.

Outlier handling — Mastercard Foundation

The Mastercard Foundation is flagged as an outlier given its extraordinary scale — its annual international cooperation expenditures run into the billions of dollars, several times the level of a few years earlier, and are heavily concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. Including it in sector-wide averages would mask the patterns that apply to the rest of the sector.

It is therefore excluded from most charts.

Three Mastercard figures, three perspectives

For any given year, three figures for Mastercard’s international cooperation activity are typically reported and can cause confusion:

• the total revenue reported by the Foundation on its CRA T3010 return for that year;
• the disbursements recorded against Mastercard in the GAC HPDS for the corresponding fiscal year;
• the figure published by the Foundation in its own annual report.

The CRA and GAC figures usually differ by a small margin due to a timing offset between revenue accounting and disbursement schedules. The Foundation’s own published figure is typically larger because it includes commitments not yet disbursed plus operating items that do not appear in either source dataset. ATLAS uses the CRA figure for revenue analysis and the GAC figure for disbursement and programme analysis; readers comparing with external publications should cite the source explicitly. The Foundations page shows the actual figures for the current reference year.

What gets filtered out of the source data

Several systematic filters are applied to the raw CRA and GAC files before any figure reaches the dashboard. They are listed here for transparency:

Canadian civil society only (GAC)

The GAC HPDS includes disbursements to multilaterals, foreign organizations, federal departments, and for-profit consultants. ATLAS retains only the activities flowing to Canadian non-profit civil-society organizations. As a safeguard, any recipient explicitly named as a consortium, alliance, or coalition is always retained, even when its other categorisation fields are incomplete. As a result GAC totals on ATLAS are smaller than the totals published by GAC itself.

Official Development Assistance only

Project activities are kept only if they qualify as ODA under DAC criteria. Non-ODA flows (private-sector instruments, other official flows) are excluded. For 2015, where GAC did not publish the flow type, the activity is treated as ODA if the recipient country was on the DAC list of ODA recipients for that year.

Minimum activity amount (GAC)

HPDS activities with an absolute amount of one Canadian dollar or less, or with no amount, are excluded. The published file contains a non-trivial number of zero-dollar administrative records; the resulting drop in totals is negligible.

Country «unspecified» in CRA Schedule 2

CRA Schedule 2 uses a placeholder code (QZ) for unspecified countries on a non-trivial share of rows. ATLAS excludes these rows from country-level analysis (no map dot, no entry in country breakdowns). The underlying expenditure is still counted at the organization level through total expenses; the side effect is that country totals derived from CRA data are systematically lower than CRA-derived sector totals.

Multiple CRA filings in the same calendar year

When a charity files two or more T3010 returns in the same calendar year (typically an amendment, or a fiscal-year-end change), ATLAS sums all filings rather than keeping only the most recent. This is consequential whenever an organization’s revenue for a given year appears unusually high — the figure may legitimately combine two separate filings.

Balanced panel for trend analysis

Year-on-year comparisons of total revenue or expenditure can be misleading when the set of organizations changes from one year to the next. To isolate real change from churn, the trend charts on the Revenue page use a stable panel of organizations that filed a CRA T3010 return in every year of the period covered by the dashboard (2015 to 2023). The same panel is used for both the «anchor 2015 looking forward» and «anchor 2023 looking back» analyses.

Charts that focus on a single year (counts of organizations, totals, distributions) use the full set of organizations active in that year — not the balanced panel. The exact size of the balanced panel and of the single-year panels is shown on the Revenue and Organizations pages and updates with every data refresh.

GAC HPDS disbursement series are reported as published (no balanced panel) because individual organizations can have gap years with no disbursements; those gaps are themselves informative.

Historical harmonisations

GAC changed several conventions across the years covered by the dataset. ATLAS applies the following harmonisations so that earlier years are comparable with later ones. None of these change the underlying data; they only translate older codings into the current ones.

Gender Equality marker — 2015

In 2015 GAC used a four-level scale (not targeted / minor / significant / principal) before adopting the three-level DAC standard (not targeted / significant / principal). ATLAS collapses the two intermediate levels into «significant». As a side effect, gender totals between 2015 and 2016 may shift slightly even at unchanged programming — no trend conclusion should be drawn from the 2015 to 2016 step alone.

Knowledge for Development and ICT (2015/16)

These were two separate markers in 2015/16 and were merged into a single «Knowledge for Development» marker in 2017/18. ATLAS takes the maximum of the two values so that historical and current years are aligned.

Region and sub-region groupings

Two parallel groupings coexist: the standard UN M49 classification (used in the technical exports and detailed views) and a custom grouping designed for the dashboard menus, which adds or restructures a few groupings of practical interest to Canadian cooperation — notably Middle East as its own region (grouping Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, instead of being dispersed inside M49’s «Western Asia»), Canada as a separate region (for domestic public-engagement activities), and Sub-Saharan Africa used directly as a sub-region rather than as an M49 «intermediate region». Country-level totals are identical between the two; region-level totals can differ depending on the view consulted.

Inflation adjustment

Unless otherwise stated, all dollar figures on ATLAS are expressed in constant 2023 Canadian dollars, adjusted using the Statistics Canada annual Consumer Price Index. This allows fair comparisons of revenue, expenditures, and disbursements across years.

Year-by-year multipliers, pulled live from Statistics Canada CPI data and auto-rebased to the current reference year (2023), so the reference year always reads 1.0000:

Per-organization averages

Because the number of organizations active each year is different, aggregate dollar trends across the period are inherently noisy. Where possible, trend charts on ATLAS report average revenue or expenditure per organization rather than aggregate dollar values.

This makes growth or decline visible without confounding it with changes in dataset coverage.

Organization size classification

ATLAS labels every organization as Very small / Small / Medium / Large / Very large based on its inflation-adjusted total revenue. Thresholds were defined by Brian Tomlinson and are applied consistently across every chart. The table below shows the current thresholds, pulled live from the ATLAS reference data:

Known limitations

Indigenous organizations

Canadian First Nations, Inuit, and Métis governments and organizations have a long history in Indigenous international cooperation, but only a very small number of organizations could be confidently identified in the CRA and GAC data covered by the dashboard. ATLAS therefore underrepresents this part of the sector.

Diaspora organizations

Diaspora groups and social movements within the sector are not separately identified because the underlying data does not flag them. Their exclusion as a classification reflects the data, not their relevance.

Pre-2019 country data

Many CRA Schedule 2 returns were incomplete on country detail before 2019, so country, regional, and sub-regional allocation trends should be read with caution for earlier years.

Provincial funding before 2016/17

The GAC HPDS only began including provincial-government and other-federal-department funding in 2016/17. Totals for 2015/16 are therefore systematically lower than later years.

Public engagement and global education

Public engagement and global education activities carried out in Canada are difficult to capture in the available financial data, so the dashboard only partially reflects this dimension of the sector’s work.

Indirect impacts and benefits

ATLAS describes the size, composition, and financial flows of the sector. It does not measure the indirect impacts or wider benefits of international cooperation, which fall outside what administrative financial data can capture.

Funding channels and cross-border transfers

Some funding channels and cross-border transfers are only partially visible in the source data. For example, funds raised in Canada by international NGOs (INGOs) and transferred to affiliated entities or partners abroad may not be fully reflected.

Actors outside CRA and GAC data

ATLAS is built from CRA and GAC datasets. Organizations and actors that do not appear in either source — including the Indigenous and diaspora organizations noted above — are not fully represented.

Single organization view

Charts and tables aggregate across organizations. Numbers should not be read as a definitive account of any single organization's programming or finances.