GPEDC Monitoring Framework : 2016 Progress Report

Community Zone Data Quality
#1

The Global Partnership’s new “Transparency Indicator” report has been published.

Remember that this indicator was designed to track progress of paragraph 23 c) of the Busan Partnership agreement

Implement a common, open standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on resources provided through development co-operation, taking into account the statistical reporting of the OECD-DAC and the complementary efforts of the International Aid Transparency Initiative and others. This standard must meet the information needs of developing countries and non-state actors, consistent with national requirements. [my emphases]

If you skim Chapter 5 this is what you will see:

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The IATI Secretariat and Technical Team has been involved in the preparation of our statistics for this report for over a year. These are the statistics that you can see on our Dashboard, and which are refreshed every night. I stand by this work and believe we have reflected - honestly, fairly and as accurately as possible - the current (and improving) status of IATI data.

According to the statistics we submitted to the progress report 35% of IATI publishers (only those that endorsed the Busan agreement) publish good or excellent data. By comparison 72% and 66% of reporters to the OECD DAC Creditor Reporting System and Forward Spending Survey respectively are reported to meet this standard.

If this is truly a fair comparison of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking data that meets the needs of developing countries I can only conclude that there remain huge gaps in our understanding of what is meant by transparent, usable data.

#2

On the last point, it would be really useful to hear from partner country stakeholders whether their needs are met by the data available through the DAC Creditor Reporting System and Forward Spending Survey. In other words, if all donors achieved an “Excellent” grade for CRS and FSS, would it be sufficient to feed into aid management systems, to inform budget planning and so on?

#3

The link above no longer works. I can’t seem to recall whether this Dashboard section on the Transparency Indicator has been removed or simply moved. Can someone from the Secretariat confirm? (If the latter, grateful if a new link could be provided.)

#4

@YohannaLoucheur it moved to here:

http://dashboard.iatistandard.org/summary_stats.html

The relevant github commit is here.

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#5

Thanks Andy

There seems to be a key difference with the previous page, in that it now covers all publishers, not only GPEDC signatories. It’s good to have comparable statistics for all, but it was useful to be able to focus on GPEDC signatories - a potential use case being the next round of monitoring, which is about to start.

Perhaps it would be possible to add a filter on the page.

#6

As I read the 2018 report, this (and Bill’s questions above) remain relevant. I do wish we could hear from partner country stakeholders on the usefulness of CRS and FSS data for planning and monitoring purposes.

#7

From my experience in partner countries (mainly fragile states [SO, SL, SS, BD, AF, UG] so experiences may vary):

  • Is OECD CRS data useful - rarely used as CRS purposecodes not recognised in country, and figures not up to date - occasionally use to check that we had a focal point for each actor reporting in the CRS that they were present in our country - or comparing our total amounts with theirs to get a ballpark
  • Is OECD FSS data useful - not ever met anyone who knows about it, plus too many problems: a) it doesn’t have any sort of breakdowns e.g. by sector b) not comprehensive (think it is voluntary even among DAC donors), c) it is Country Programmable Aid (so the numbers often don’t match what is going to be reported elsewhere), d) even if it had project level data, it doesn’t distinguish between on/off budget projects so hard to work out which bits to use for the budget, e) multi-bi programming reported by bilaterals so not match contacts on the ground. So while data matching the FSS concept is very much in demand (more so than backwards data due to use in the budget process of every country - backwards data is mainly just used for a dead-end report) - but we always requested it from donor/implementer offices in-country for the reasons above.

That was mainly the MoF/Budget side - in terms of planning - data comes from personal relationships between implementers and staff in Line Ministries/SWGs, and for M+E is an even smaller subset where the government is actively invited (by the donor/implementer) for monitoring so even more relationship based.

Attached is a Somali annual aid report - see pages 3 and 4 for forward looking data in use - also note that in this case the data is extremely political and therefore FSS was not used as in-country offices refused to be held to it.Aid Flows 14Nov_FINAL.pdf (750.1 KB)

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