NGOMIS

The Next Decade of Impact Starts with a Common Taxonomy

From e-commerce to healthcare, taxonomies have quietly powered search, discovery, and data interoperability for decades. Learn why the impact sector needs the same foundation to organize knowledge, mobilize resources, and enable AI-powered innovation.

1 min read
The Next Decade of Impact Starts with a Common Taxonomy

When you search an online marketplace for a smartphone, the marketplace lets you filter hundreds of smartphones by brand, storage, price, and other specifications. Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and hundreds of other online marketplaces deliver billions of highly accurate product searches and recommendations, irrespective of the search terms. To map user intent into products, online marketplaces use a simple tool called 'taxonomy'. Like the marketplaces, search engines and social media platforms also use taxonomies to map user intent with content and resources.

Taxonomy
A taxonomy is a hierarchical list of concepts with standardized names and descriptions, enabling consistent organization, discovery, retrieval, and use of information across an organization.

Vocabulary
A vocabulary, or a controlled vocabulary, is a curated collection of concepts for a specific domain, each with standardized labels, descriptions, and relationships, used to ensure consistent organization, tagging, search, and exchange of information.

Taxonomies in International Development

A few international development organizations maintain vocabularies to standardize the concepts across global and country teams. UNESCO Vocabularies, for example, define concepts in education, science, culture, social and human sciences, and information and communication domains.1 EU maintains four key vocabularies - DE-BIAS Vocabulary, Europa Thesaurus, EuroVoc, and European Commission Library. Organizations use EU Vocabularies across domains and regions.2 OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms standardizes terms for data collection on economic and social activities across its member states.3 Launched first in 2016, The World Bank Theme Taxonomy focusing on economic development, human and social development, sustainable infrastructure and environment, and digital, data, and governance.4

Taxonomies Used by Countries

National statistical organizations use standardized taxonomies to ensure that data collected through different surveys, by different government agencies over multiple periods remain comparable. The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), under the guidance of the United Nations Statistical Commission, develops international reference classifications such as the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) for economic activities and the Central Product Classification (CPC) for goods and services. Countries typically adapt these international standards into national classifications while preserving mappings to the UN standards, allowing national statistics to be compared internationally.

Region Country / Organization Industry Classification Product Classification Notes
East Africa Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) Kenya Standard Industrial Classification (KSIC), aligned to ISIC Central Product Classification (CPC) for product statistics and national accounts National classifications are aligned with UN statistical standards.5
Southeast Asia Thailand National Statistical Office Thailand Standard Industrial Classification (TSIC), based on ISIC Rev.4 Thailand Standard Product Classification (TSPC), based on CPC Thailand adapts UN reference classifications for official statistics.5
South Asia India (MoSPI) National Industrial Classification (NIC), based on successive revisions of ISIC National Product Classification for Manufacturing Sector (NPCMS), based on CPC India has revised NIC alongside revisions of UN ISIC (1970, 1987, 1998, 2004, 2008), while NPCMS is derived from CPC.5
Latin America Brazil (IBGE) Classificação Nacional de Atividades Econômicas (CNAE), based on ISIC Central de Produtos (Prodlist/CPC correspondence) Brazil's national classifications maintain correspondence with ISIC and CPC for international reporting.6

These glossaries and classifications define the survey questions and indicators by national statistical organizations. Country finance and planning ministries have used these taxonomies for reporting for the international development goals.

Organizations Speak Their Own Language

Over time, organizations accumulate deep knowledge about their products, customers, communities, programmes, and markets. Businesses continually expand their customer base while developing increasingly sophisticated product and market knowledge. Rather than scaling solely through geographic expansion, impact organizations often scale by sharing knowledge, mentoring peer organizations, mobilizing resources, and adapting proven impact models to new communities and regions.

An organization's language is not defined by inventing new words or phrases. Instead, it develops its own way of organizing and describing knowledge. The same concept may be classified differently depending on the organization's mission, operating model, and context. Its taxonomy therefore reflects its own programme structure, geographic hierarchy, stakeholder groups, and relationships between concepts. Capturing this organizational context enables people and AI systems to discover, interpret, and reuse information consistently.

Driving Collaboration, Talent, and Funding

Taxonomies make an organization's expertise and project portfolio easier to discover. By classifying projects using standardized concepts, organizations can better showcase their experience to governments, foundations, multilateral agencies, and other funders, strengthening resource mobilization and the identification of capable implementation partners.

Taxonomies also make it easier to discover people with relevant expertise. Organizations can classify staff, consultants, researchers, and volunteers by their skills, sectors, geographic experience, and project history, enabling faster identification of talent for new initiatives.

Finally, taxonomies strengthen collaboration by helping organizations identify partners with complementary expertise, geographic presence, and program experience. This enables governments, nonprofits, academia, and the private sector to discover one another more effectively and build partnerships based on demonstrated capabilities rather than keyword searches alone.

Scouting Impact Evidence for Scaling

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) tracks international aid to developing countries. In 2025, IATI recorded more than 126,000 aid activities representing approximately US$347 billion in funding. Governments, multilateral development banks, nonprofits, and private sector organizations report project information to funding agencies, publish impact reports, and share standardized data through the IATI reporting framework.7

Most project repositories, however, provide only basic search and filtering options based on fields such as sector, location, donor, or implementing organization. For example, the Indian Ministry of Corporate Affairs maintains a directory of CSR projects with advanced search capabilities, but users cannot easily identify projects based on detailed implementation approaches, delivery models, community characteristics, or evidence of what contributed to successful outcomes.

Scaling an impact model requires more than finding similar projects—it requires discovering what worked, where it worked, for whom, under what conditions, and why. By organizing interventions, beneficiary groups, implementation methods, technologies, outcomes, and contextual factors into standardized concepts, taxonomies enable practitioners, researchers, funders, and AI applications to discover relevant evidence and identify proven models that can be adapted and replicated in new settings.

Conclusion

For decades, taxonomies have quietly powered e-commerce, search engines, digital libraries, healthcare systems, and national statistics. As the impact sector embraces semantic search, knowledge graphs, and generative AI, taxonomies are poised to become equally important for international development. They provide a common language that enables organizations to organize knowledge, connect data across systems, discover evidence, and collaborate more effectively.

The next decade of impact will be shaped not only by how much knowledge organizations create, but also by how easily that knowledge can be discovered, understood, and reused by people and AI systems alike. Organizations that invest today in developing and maintaining taxonomies will be better positioned to mobilize resources, build partnerships, identify proven interventions, and scale successful impact models. Taxonomies are no longer just a knowledge management tool—they are foundational infrastructure for the next generation of digital public goods and AI-enabled impact ecosystems.

References

  1. UNESCO. UNESCO Vocabularies. Paris: UNESCO, 2026. https://vocabularies.unesco.org/unesco/en/
  2. Publications Office of the European Union. EU Vocabularies: Ontologies. Luxembourg: European Union. https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/ontologies
  3. OECD. OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264055087-en
  4. World Bank. The World Bank Theme Taxonomy: June 2025. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43948
  5. United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD). International Standard Classifications. United Nations. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/classifications/unsdclassifications
  6. Government of India, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. National Product Classification for Manufacturing Sector (NPCMS) 2025. Press Information Bureau, July 28, 2025. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2161192&lang=2&reg=3
  7. Government of Kenya. Kenya Vision 2030 Strategic Plan 2023/24–2027/28. Vision 2030 Secretariat. https://vision2030.go.ke/publication/vision-2030-2023-24-2027-28-strategic-plan/