This proposal is part of the 2.03 upgrade process, please comment by replying below.
Standard
Activity
**Schema Object** iati-activity/transaction/transaction-type
**Type of Change** Codelist modifications
**Issue** Three separate issues
- During fast-onset emergencies it is possible, and useful, in some circumstances for a donor to record advance information on an intended commitment. This is defined as a ‘pledge’.
- ‘Interest Repayment’ doesn’t make sense - interest is **paid**, not **repaid**.
- With the addition, in Version 2.01, of “Incoming Commitment” it makes sense to rename the original “Commitment” to “Outgoing Commitment”
**Proposal**
- Addition
- Code: 12
- Name: Outgoing Pledge
- Description: Indicative, non-binding advice of an intended outgoing commitment.
- Addition
- Code: 13
- Name: Incoming Pledge
- Description: Indicative, non-binding advice of an intended incoming commitment.
- Modification
- Code: 5
- Name: Interest Payment
- Modification
- Code: 2
- Name: Outgoing Commitment
**Standards Day** Proposals for new Pledge codes were accepted.
**Links** http://bit.ly/2lCMYvS Previous discussions - https://discuss.iatistandard.org/t/amend-name-of-transaction-type-inter… https://discuss.iatistandard.org/t/does-commitment-need-to-be-renamed-t…
I believe that there are several. As far as I know, we are the minority - reporting commitments in the bookkeeping sense of ‘binding aggreement with external party’. Most DAC-donors are actually reporting grants (i.e. pledges) as ‘commitment’ in DAC-statistics, so I would assume this to be the case in IATI-publications as well.
I would agree there may not be great record keeping of pledges, in trying to track pledges in the past getting a consistent answer was pretty impossible. That challenge though is part of why it would be helpful to have it reported here. The pledges are public statements that donors get credit for, and therefore should be held accountable to, but to be able to do that there needs to be a mechanism to track from pledge to disbursement. A challenge may be that in reality commitments may be all that get reported anyways, but its a step in the right direction to addressing the situation.