If you took part in Publish What You Fund’s recent Aid Transparency Index methodology review, you will know that one of the key issues we grappled with was how to measure the ‘visibility’ of a donor’s data.
By visibility, we mean the amount of information a donor publishes to IATI compared to their whole portfolio of work.
The greater the proportion on IATI = the more visible the information.
We want to be able to measure this, because we want as much information on aid and development finance as possible to be provided in a timely, comparable and open format. This happens when data is published to IATI, rather than remaining on closed or internal systems.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the discussions and debates on this issue. In the end, we decided not to implement a measure of visibility at this time, as it would be difficult to apply to all the organisations in the Index consistently. However, we had a lot of useful discussions and feedback from you all, so we are now releasing a paper outlining our approach and the stumbling blocks that we encountered.
Read the full paper here. The key questions we would like more discussion around are:
Question 1 – What resources, flows and spending should be considered as developmentrelated and in scope for publication to IATI? How might these differ from established definitions such as ODA?
Question 2 – What is the scope for organisations publishing data in the IATI Standard to publish forward-looking spending data, and what changes to disclosure rules and norms may be needed to enable more organisations to do this?
Question 3 – What is a reasonable threshold for aid and development finance to be considered visible for the purposes of the Aid Transparency Index or other assessments?
We welcome your thoughts on these questions! Please post them here.
Please log in or sign up to comment.