As you may be aware, the DAC Chair (Charlotte Petri Gornitzka) gave a talk at the IATI Members’ Assembly last week, and spoke very positively about co-operation between DAC and IATI. In addition, the miniTAG at FAO last Friday looked at technical interoperability around codelists.
So, how could we achieve this greater interoperability between IATI and the DAC? I’d be grateful for thoughts around the following dimensions:
- short-term/longer-term
- technical/operational/strategic
Although there are some edge cases - how, for example, do you export an IATI activity that contains percentage splits on sectors and countries - I do believe this is possible. I would initially see the output not as an automatic submission to CRS but a file for DAC reporters to work with.
This is not currently a priority for the Tech Team (we’ve got websites and datastores and validation tools to build) but we and others (Herman van Loon ?) would, I’m sure, be happy to advise an intrepid developer supported by a visionary DAC donor.
Yes, very interesting, is there anyone familiar with the CRS++ submission process who could share how this is currently dealt with as it is not an IATI specific issue, the same problem must come also when preparing the current non-IATI based CRS++ submissions. I have found a copy of the guidance here which suggests that this issue is similar to the issue of a donor funding a multilateral i.e. the solution is to also take the measurement from the recipient perspective i.e. what outflow from project X which covers multiple countries, was received by country Y. In reality, I presume that percentage splits are taken based on the percentages for each country receiving benefits from an activity/project.
Perhaps someone (Ole Jacob (OJ) Hjøllund ?) could also share the format for submitting data to the DAC?, I can only find mention of what sounds like a spreadsheet reporting format e.g. see mention of columns here.
The format is being changed these years; we are moving from a format where only the primary purposecode could be reported and multible countries shall be aggregated to the relevant regional code, to a format that allows multible purposecodes (totaling 100%) and multible countrycodes. The first is decided, the second is expected to be approved next year. Personally, I am pushing for a data-governance rule that only allows the reporter to apply one multible element for any activity; it is hardly useful or transparent to have multible on multibles - how should a fifty-fifty coding of two purposecodes for two countries be interpreted by the relevant consituency in any of the countries? I also claim that one of the multibles will be more important than the other in any specific activity.
The complete CRS++ format is available on OECD’s website, along with the Directive that provides instructions and guidelines on the completion of the format.
I will revisit this post Friday and include links - it’s too much of a challenge on the phone in the airport …
Agree. I also think it is in principle possible to produce CRS++ from IATI. A few years ago we did a pilot to do exactly this. There were a few challenges, but they can be overcome. Since we are already producing CRS++ and IATI from the same reporting database, the added value of this format conversion is not very significant, and therefore we haven’t pursued this.
What would be interesting though is if the DAC would be willing to accept IATI XML as a data interchange format to do DAC reporting. IATI XML for instance supports multiple CRS purpose codes and multiple countries for one activity. The DAC is, if I am not mistaken, also considering multiple CSR pupose codes for one activity. I.m.o. the CRS++ flat file format will be too inflexible to accomodate these kind of changes. But in the end it is up to the DAC of course what formats will be accepted.