Indicator Methodology - Summary of Issues and Recommendations

Consultations
#1

This is an index of issues and recommendations reported publicly and privately which we will add to as a central point of reference during this consultation.

Timeliness

  • Publishers who have had to change their reporting organisation identifier lose their frequency history.

Forward Looking

  • Publishers whose community best practice recognises that forward looking data cannot be published (for example DFIs) should not be penalised. Crowd-funders such as Global Giving are also penalised.
  • Should planned disbursements be taken into consideration as well as budgets?
  • Humanitarian aid and crisis response is often impossible to plan in advance, due to the nature of the business. The non-provision of forward looking data in these cases should not be penalised.

Comprehensiveness - Financials

  • Donor publishers who do not need to report any incoming funds should not be assessed on traceability.
  • Current guidance on how implementing organisations should report commitments is not clear and explains why many publishers score badly on this element.

Comprehensiveness - Value Added

  • Publisher guidance is currently not clear that adding locations and coordinates to activities of national and regional scope is beneficial and therefore assessing coordinates for all activities is fair.
  • Add “Aid Type” and “Disbursement Channel”
  • Add “Use of Recipient Language” once a suitable methodology is established

Coverage

  • IATI bilateral publishers whose government reports to the DAC but who themselves only report for specific agencies (rather than on their country’s total ODA) should be assessed against the matching DAC donor agencies’ disbursements in the CRS, not the DAC donor as a whole.
  • The above argument also applies to EC Agencies

Presentation

  • A filter or sort by Organisation Type on all tables would be useful for comparison of like with like. It would also be useful for tables to ‘remember’ the previous sort: so that sorting by Col A and then by Col B results in a sort ‘by Col B by Col A’
  • Column headings on Coverage and Indicator tables are scrolling off the page (unlike all other pages)
Indicator Coverage Methodology - consultation space
#2
#3

Now that the Sustainable Development Goals are a reality, signed on to by donors and developing countries, how can a DFI-relevant methodology better reflect contributions towards the SDGs? Is there any thinking and action on this?

#4

@bill_anderson

I am not sure if this has been discussed, but how will this methodology and scoring be used. Many donors are already subject to the scoring of the Publish What You Fund Aid Transparency Index. Has there been consultation with that group on scoring and indicator methdology. It would not be prudent to introduce another methdology so that donors are “answering to multiple masters” with different methods. The U.S. would like to express this concern.

#5

As we approach the date of 31st May when the Transparency Indicator (TI) statistics for Busan signatories will be taken to be assessed by the Global Partnership, we thought it would be useful to highlight some of the recent updates that have been made to the TI dashboard in response to issues raised by members, so that it remains both fair to publishers and aligned with the TI methodology:

• Publishers who are still publishing at V1.xx of the IATI Standard no longer have their organisation identifier validated against their activity identifier prefixes. This means publishers that have changed their organistion identifiers are not penalised
• ‘Activity Website’ and ‘Conditions’ have both been removed from the ‘Value Added’ section of the ‘Comprehensiveness’ statistics
• ‘Aid Type’ and ‘Recipient Language’ have both been added to the ‘Value Added’ section of the ‘Comprehensiveness’ statistics
• Incoming commitment transactions (that were added at V2.02 of the IATI Standard) are treated in the same way as for commitment transactions
• Secondary publishers are not included in the Transparency Indicator assessment

Details of any of the above along with all bug fixes / enhancements etc. that relate to all sections of the IATI dashboard can be found at https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Dashboard/issues