IATI recommends that publishers segment their published activity data into separate files per country or region. There are two man reasons for this:

• It reduces the size of files so that they are easy to download irrespective of bandwidth.
• It allows users of the data to access all data for a particular country via a simple search of the Registry.

But life is not that simple:

• Not all publishers do segment their files.
• IATI has a rule that a publisher should never duplicate the reporting of an activity. So where is a multi-country activity filed?
• In other words, it is not possible to use the registry to download a set of files that contain all the activities for a single country or region.