Hi everyone,
As an extension to OIPA’s functionality we would like to add the option to convert values to a specific currency. For example, this would make it possible to do aggregations on transaction in different currencies.
To be able to do this we need an exchange rate dataset. Datasets like this are published by IMF, World Bank and OECD and others. However, we are unsure what dataset is best suited for this purpose, seeing how they seem to differ and secondly we do not want to make use general market rates.
Does the IATI community have an opinion on what dataset would be most accurate to use for this use?
Work has been done by ourselves last year, D-Portal and work on the BD AIMS has been done, but no general solution exists that could work for IATI works.
Suggestions more than welcome.
Regards, Robin
Hi matmaxgeds - thanks for flagging this.
As I don’t think that it is possible to sent an explicit exchange rate for a given transaction, I’ve added a post to describe this in our separate forum for Modifications, Additions, Improvements to the IATI standard. This means that it will be considered for inclusion in future upgrades of the standard.
Hi Dale Potter , great, thanks - let me know if there is anything I can do to make it happen e.g. rounding up examples, or testing etc. Also registering with the iatisupport site so I am available there too.
Matt
I’ve started collecting rates from http://openexchangerates.org (daily rates available from 1999 onward), interesting to compare these. I guess an SDR exchange rate makes sense too.
To throw in some of my questions:
Hi,
Our work in Bangladesh has also identified that many donors have their own exchange rates (often set by their central bank / ministry of finance) and therefore when converting projects between currencies, these are the ones that need using. For example, the Netherlands update their EUR to USD rate annually, and this is the rate that should be used for converting the values on their projects - using another rate would be might reduce the value of IATI data as it would no longer match the official values expected by the publisher. This is also often an issue for loans, where the loan agreement might include an official rate of conversion for the life of the loan.
Is there somewhere in IATI that would allow publishers to include this information e.g. an exchange rate field, to go after the currency and value fields for the transactions? This would also massively increase the utility of IATI for monitoring debt data - integration of IATI feeds into CS-DRMS and DFMAS would be a huge win for recipient countries.
Matt