Global Charity Register Transparency Index 2026
How open are the world's official charity registers? This index scores 76 countries on seven dimensions, from whether a public register exists at all to whether it publishes financial filings and board data in machine readable form. It scores governments and their register infrastructure. It never scores charities.
Key findings
Australia, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, New Zealand, and the United States. All share free search, bulk open data, published financial filings, and published governance data. Canada misses by one point at 98.
Latvia and Estonia score 100 while Germany scores 49: its national register has no export, no financial data, and no officer data. Austria scores 39 and Spain 38.
Jordan (59), Egypt (56), Saudi Arabia (54), and Morocco (42) all outscore Germany. Their registers refuse foreign connections but are information rich inside: Egypt's returns registration numbers for 36,559 organizations, and Saudi Arabia publishes per-organization governance scores.
In 13 countries scoring under 20, registration runs through a ministry or official gazette and the public sees nothing. The score reflects government data policy, never the charities of that country. Five more countries could not be assessed at all: their official infrastructure is unreachable from any network route.
The ranking
Not ranked: Nepal (assessed on six of seven dimensions; its register site was offline throughout the assessment window, even from in-country network access) and Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, and Yemen (official infrastructure unreachable from every network route tried). A country is ranked only when all seven dimensions carry a verified official source.
How it is scored
Seven dimensions, fixed anchors, 100 points. Every scored cell carries an official source URL and a retrieval date. Nearly every cell can be re-verified at that URL in minutes; for registers that refuse international connections, the Zenodo deposit includes retrieval-dated captured evidence. Research was performed by AI research agents under the published methodology, with an independent audit and human editorial control; a country is ranked only when all seven dimensions are verified.
Timmermans, M. (2026). Global Charity Register Transparency Index 2026, Edition 1. GiveRadar. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21804904
Report, dataset, methodology, independent audit findings, and evidence pack are published under CC-BY-4.0 at the DOI above. GiveRadar intends to run this index annually.