UK Overseas Charities: an SDG-classified dataset of England and Wales registered charities operating internationally

An open dataset of 19,688 active charities registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales that operate internationally, built from the Commission's public register extract (snapshot of 9 July 2026), geocoded to head-office postcodes (95.8% geocoded), and classified by theme. Each charity carries one primary and up to two secondary UN Sustainable Development Goals, a one-line focus summary, and a three-way flag for how it engages overseas (operates directly abroad, funds partners abroad, UK fundraising only). Classification used a large language model (Claude Haiku 4.5, named here once for reproducibility) reading only each charity's own register text. Validation: a stratified sample of 150 charities was frozen and hand-labelled blind by the author. Strict primary-SDG accuracy is 77.3% (95% CI 70.0 to 83.3%). Three-way overseas-engagement accuracy is 65.3% (95% CI 57.4 to 72.5%); a post hoc binary collapse of the two overseas-active classes reads 83.3% (125/150). Per-class tables and known failure modes are in outputs/validation/ and METHODS.md inside the archive. The archive contains the main dataset (data/processed/uk_overseas_charities.csv), geocoded and GeoJSON variants, the SDG tag table, the full validation sheet, key and results, the pipeline source code, and the source of the interactive map published at https://jacksc09.github.io/uk-overseas-charities/. Licensing: the derived classifications (SDG tags, engagement flags, confidence ratings, focus summaries) are released under CC0 1.0. Charity numbers and all register-derived fields contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (data: Charity Commission for England and Wales). Postcode geocoding uses postcodes.io: contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026; contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026; source: Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The iati_publisher_id column uses publisher-identity metadata from the IATI Registry; each publisher's declared licence is recorded per publisher in data/processed/iati_publishers.csv. The source code is released under the MIT License. This dataset supplements a SocArXiv preprint (DOI 10.31235/osf.io/tky7s).