How is IATI being used in the M&E space?
Large grant-makers like the UK’s Department of International Development and the Dutch Foreign Ministry are newly requiring grantees to use IATI to publish information about their aid activities. Does this mean that these entities or other large grant-makers like the Gates Foundation, which publishes data in compliance with IATI, are, have considered or might be willing to allow NGOs to use their IATI data to meet donor reporting requirements, reducing the reporting burden on NGOs?
An NGO just asked me how IATI is being used for M&E and they’d like to see an example. Any thoughts, templates or links?
Hi Brent, Michael, Bill and Rolf
Yes we are using IATI as a means to report progress. But we at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs do not use IATI for financial reporting. I agree with Michael that the IATI standard is not designed for financial accountability.
The big challenge using the IATI data for progress monitoring is the data quality. Especially the use of valid IATI identifiers when referencing other publishers activities needs to be much better than it is right now.
Herman I assume you mean something more nuanced than this. IATI surely delivers at least part of what you as a donor require in terms of financial reporting?
I may be lacking in imagination on this one, but I think that only a subset of qualitative indicators could be standardised. Every advocacy intervention, for example, tries to achieve a different thing, contributing to a specific change (influencing the content of a policy, or a budget amount, or the capacity of civil society to advocate for change…). And in a world of problems with complex causal pathways and requiring systems change, the interventions of individual actors are best captured by increasingly specific contributions, rather than high-level changes. Standardisation and comparability is great when it is feasible, but there is a bad history of artificially standardising outcome indicators, which produces information that is not terribly useful, while also sometimes creating perverse incentives. This topic would benefit from a more in-depth conversation…
Yes, IATI does indeed provide a part of our financial reporting requirements. IATI does not however fulfill financial accounting requirements such as (but not limited to):
Should we have the ambition to use IATI for financial accountability? It would add a lot of complexity to the standard and distract from the use of IATI for M&E purposes.
Michael O'Donnell I agree totally that there is a bad history of artificially standardising outcome indicators. For that very reason I remain unconvinced that IATI can ever be a great M&E tool.
M&E is all about outcomes and impact and as an activity-based reporting standard IATI is in most instances totally unsuited to this task. Impacts are generally the result of many activities executed by many organisations in environments influenced by many factors. IATI cannot do justice to this complex interaction. Donors would do development a great service by investing part of their M&E budgets into the development of local statistical capacity in the areas in which they work. (See my argument for this here.)
IATI’s greatest strength is that it provides comparable, machine-readable, structured data through the lens of activities and transactions. As such I think we should in the first instance really push for widespread use of the results element to deliver structured data on activity outputs.
More generally I remain unconvinced that the IATI standard is the most suitable vehicle for exchanging loads of unstructured free text.
yes
And this may not be nearly as simple as it sounds. Getting this reasonably well would already be a big step forward.
Michael what we aspire to is comparable, and therefore structured, data which is not necessarily quantitative. There is no reason why M&E sectoral experts can’t agree on qualitative machine readable indicators, is there?