Guidance on implementing aid and budget alignment

@andylolz While guidance does not need to be approved as part of the upgrade, we have included a number of guidance proposals that were discussed at the TAG into the 2.03 upgrade index so that they can be added alongside the upgrade process, if not earlier. I will need to check with @bill_anderson about specific deadline for adding them.

In that case, maybe it would be better to include this guidance proposal with the 2.03 Decimal Upgrade Proposals too?

@andylolz I forgot to say in my previous response that I have already added this one to the index.

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Just spotted something, @markbrough:

This line is very important – I think it would be clearer to say this in the first line of 2b. So instead of:

(b) Use the more detailed “voluntary” CRS purpose codes

you could say:

(b) Use the more detailed “voluntary” CRS purpose codes, not “parent” codes

Thanks for flagging this @andylolz, agree it would be a good addition. @petyakangalova - I cannot edit my post above anymore, so please can you add this in? Also, what is the progress on adding this guidance (I presume it would be to the IATI Standard website)? I am not really sure what needs to happen next.

@markbrough I have amended the text in the proposal. As with other guidance (see point 3 in the index), we will be following the same timetable for the upgrade process and will add to the IATI standard website.

Thanks @petyakangalova!

As a process point: Perhaps stuff that doesn’t need to be part of the standard upgrade shouldn’t be lumped in with it. It seems like it just makes the standard upgrade more confusing, and I’m unsure what the benefit is.

Here’s an example where doing this appears to have caused some confusion.

Anyway – just a suggestion.

HI

I’m interested in how this will happen. The rest of this thread seems to be about adding / changing guidance around the standard. If the actual BudgetIdentifier codelist is to be acted upon, then something needs to happen?

For reference / more widely, I don’t think we should do similar to OrganisationIdentifier “codelist”, which has some narrative to declare that it is deprecated, but is still “included” in the standard.

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Other thing.

@YohannaLoucheur mentions

Obviously, CRS purpose codes are published in Sector element. Country-budget-item no longer needed - but kept for potential future needs

(see full thread):

Am I correct in thinking that this proposal misses out this point. Does it need to be made explicit that publishers should use sector rather than country-budget-item ?

(In turn, I think this then starts to raise complexities in terms of multiple sectors and, even, secondary sectors, potentially. Sorry)

Thanks for the feedback on this @stevieflow! On deprecation, I do not know how this is supposed to happen (I am not aware of any particular process around deprecation). But yes, this thread is very much focused on providing guidance.

Yeah perhaps. Maybe the point 2. in the draft guidance should be changed to:

However, I am not sure what you mean by complexities in terms of multiple or secondary sectors. You use these sectors / more detailed purpose codes in the same way as you would use any other CRS purpose codes.

Great, thanks Mark

Was just thinking of scenarios whereby publishers might want to maintain a sector code as a primary classification, but then also utilise the voluntary codes for potential “non-statistical” classifications. This might be a tangent though - so better to focus on the other parts of this thread!

Im trying to figure out if anything around this has happened via 2.03.

Should the BudgetIdentifier codelist have been deprecated?

Any idea @petyakangalova @markbrough @YohannaLoucheur @andylolz ?

I can see that the voluntary purpose codes are now in both the 2.03 5-digit sector list, and also the source OECD DAC XML (@andylolz can confirm) - so that might now affect this:

I can indeed confirm this. In fact, the OECD DAC XML adds the “voluntary” purpose codes as codes (i.e. consistent with the way they’re included in the IATI codelist), and just flags the voluntary bit in the status (it says “vonlontary” but that’s a typo).

Searching back through this forum, it appears the answer to this is yes it should.

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@IATI-techteam is this guidance also going to be added on the website sometime in the near future? Do you want a pull request from me to do this?

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Bumping this. I found the relevant bit in the standards day notes (rows 102 and 103):

Proposal: Deprecate the BudgetIdentifier codelist
Outcome: Accept
Discussion: Consensus as codelist has been replaced by expanded CRS Purpose codes

Proposal: Remove reference to the BudgetIdentifier codelist in the definition of country-budget-items/budget-item/@code
Outcome: Accept
Discussion: We would deprecate at 2.03 and remove in integer, although it was noted that there is no process on the deprecation of individual elements. Comms would need to be provided to publishers about this, perhaps as separate guidelines.

I’m not sure what happened with these, but @stevieflow is right in pointing out that neither has been actioned in v2.03.

Relatedly, the aid and budget alignment guidelines were bumped to v2.03, but haven’t been added yet.

One concrete consequence of this not being actioned is the recent report by Cohen and Mekuria that is based on the Budget ID codelist rather than the expanded CRS codelist. That’s a missed opportunity to see what IATI can tell us about aid flows to a specific country.

This is not correct.

If you read the acknowledgements in the report you will see that the methodology was written by Simon Parrish. This would have been before the agreement by WP-STAT of new CRS purpose codes.

The methodology was written by Simon, but the report itself is more recent, having been published in January 2018 (thus presumably written in 2017). Though it does refer to the “common code” as a recent proposal, which is very confusing.

In any case, clearly marking this codelist as deprecated, as decided by the TAG a year ago, and adding the guidelines, would help avoid further confusion for both publishers and users of IATI data.

What’s the best way to remedy this @IATI-techteam ?

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