We scored 76 countries' official charity registers on openness. Six hit 100/100; Germany got 49, and Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all beat it

By matt_timmermans @ 2026-08-05T22:51 (+1)

We at GiveRadar just published the Global Charity Register Transparency Index 2026 (edition 1): every country's official charity register scored on seven dimensions with fixed anchors: register existence, public accessibility, machine readability, identifier system, financial disclosure by the register, governance data, and update cadence. 100 points total. It scores governments and their register infrastructure, never charities.

The interesting findings:

• Wealth does not predict openness. Latvia and Estonia score 100 (daily open-data dumps, board members, financials, CC0/CC-BY licensed). Germany scores 49: its national register is a search box with no export, no financials, no officers. Austria 39, Spain 38.
• Jordan (59), Egypt (56), Saudi Arabia (54), and Morocco (42) all outscore Germany. Their registries refuse foreign connections, so we verified them from in-country network access. Inside, they are information rich: Egypt returns a registration number and a 13-digit unified number for 36,559 organizations through its own search API, and Saudi Arabia publishes a governance score per organization, which almost no Western register does.
• In 13 countries scoring under 20, registration runs through a ministry or the official gazette and the public sees nothing. Five more countries could not be assessed at all: every official host is unreachable from every network route we tried, which for cross-border donors is its own answer.
• Portugal has a public foundations database that returns zero results for every query. We checked from three networks, including by hand. That is now a finding in the dataset.

Method notes for this crowd: the research was performed by AI research agents under a published methodology. An independent audit re-fetched a random sample of 20 cells (all supported), issued three score corrections (Belgium dropped from 100 to 83 because most Belgian VZWs file at the enterprise court, where nothing is published), and enforced cross-batch anchor consistency. A country is ranked only when all seven dimensions carry a verified official source URL; everything else is listed as not assessed rather than guessed.

Everything is CC-BY-4.0: report PDF, full dataset CSV, methodology, audit findings, and an evidence pack with retrieval-dated captures for the registers you cannot reach from outside their country.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21804904

Full ranking: https://giveradar.com/research/charity-register-transparency-index-2026/ew