DQI Consultation: Data Completeness -2.3.1 - 2.3.5 Classification and 2.5 Sustainable Development Goals

2.3.5 Flow type - I always struggle with this one because the flow type may not be relevant or known by the downstream recipients/implementers so to require it across the board would be unfair or misleading. I believe this may be one of those elements that either has to be nuanced depending upon the publisher type (discussed previously) or these classification have to be explicit in the contracts which is a very hard thing to require on a consistent basis. I've had a goverment donor explicitly tell us that the grant was not ODA related and thus shouldn't be published to IATI which made me question what I had understood to be that all grants would be ODA from our perspective.  We now have an algorithm that looks at where the project is and who gives us the money to classify it is ODA (code 10) or non-export OOF (21 becuase plain OOF - 20 has been withdrawn)  and I still don't know if we really have it right. As a non-OECD reporter,  I'm not really sure my understanding of their guidance is correct.  

The other elements suggested here seem reasonable across the board for all publishers.

Thanks so much for kicking off the consultation, Michelle Levesque ! I'm sure Amy Silcock would have some comments from the technical side!

We have some general comments on this phase which can be found in the numbered points in the document below :  

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BpEjcypxpHJ_SNCnscy2HZe7otEZZIYcjE7HPFdDPfI/edit?usp=sharing

As well as some indicator specific comments :

2.3.1 - 2.3.5 Classification  

2.3.3 Policy Marker classification: 

• Not all activities need to include a policy marker. There is no requirement for background documents explaining the rationale for the policy marker and score so there are no checks that the significance was screened. Policy marker use generally is not standardised across all types of donors. Giving publishers a score on % these may not have much meaning since it may depend on whether they are screening activities for the policy markers. 

2.5 Sustainable Development Goals 

• Not all activities/publishers will follow the SDGs - many may not, particularly non-official organisations. SDGs are a UN initiative that delegates implementation to international agencies and governments but orgs. outside this system may not report on SDGs. Giving publishers a score on % these won’t be an objective way of measuring publishers. 

2.3.2 Question: The measure looks for the presence of the default-aid-type element, if not present should an aid-type element be present for every transaction?

Yes

General comment: It is not clear from the methodology description if at least one of the aid type vocabularies needs to be used for the data to be considered “good quality” or all vocabularies. In ILO’s view publishing aid type using at least one of the vocabularies should be enough. You may consider reformulating for more clarity.

2.3.4 Question: The measure looks for the presence of the default-finance-type element, if not present should a finance-type element be present for every transaction?

When finance type is published at the transaction level the “Expenditure” transactions should be excluded from the review because none of the values in the IATI Finance Type codelist reflects the nature of expenditure transactions – the purchase of goods and services from commercial suppliers on market terms.

General comment: 2.3.4 is repeated twice

2.5. Question: Should both tag and sector SDG classifications be included? SDG guidance states that tag should always be used.

Since the IATI standard allows using both the “tag” and the “sector” for publishing SDG information, ILO considers that the publisher should be able to choose under which of these elements to publish SDG data. If sector is published using SDG vocabulary it should be considered as “good quality data” even if the SDG tag is not published. If there is a valid reason for not using “sector” for publishing SDG info, then such a possibility should be excluded from the standard. Until then, in our view, publishers should not be punished for choosing one of the options proposed by the standard and not the other.

A comment I made during the discussion and will reiterate here as it relates to the SDGs.  Because we know using the tag is more universal and the recommended way to include SDGs in the data, yet the UN agencies will use sector because of our concurrent UN reporting requirements, if we include both sector and tags we start to get redundant in our data files.  This is the same case in other elements and a concern we have to consider is the huge file sizes that may get unwieldy.  In testing our new files, we stressed CoVE to the point that was unworkable.  This is just something to think about as/when we start thinking of IATI 3.0 or whatever the next upgrade would be called and as we continue to provide recommendations and guidance on how to publish data.  I understand making it easy for users is key but we can't make it so difficult for publishers either.  Just something to think about. 

2.3.1 is redundant with 2.1.1

2.3.2; 2.3.4; 2.3.5 Others mentioned in the discussion that some of the classifications are only used by donors - these elements do come for the DAC CRS after all. While they can be very relevant in the context of partner country public accounts (eg whether an activity is a loan or a grant), only flows originating from eg bilateral donors and MDBs would be characterised - and accounted - using these categories. To assess and potentially shame publishers for not using categories that don't really apply to their activities does not add value, and could be counter-productive. We should seriously consider an Index with sub-sections for specific groups of publishers.

We agree with the inclusion of policy markers and SDG. 

Can I ask Sarah McDuff - IATI Secretariat and Amy Silcock to come in here on the sub-sections question (for different groups of publishers)?

We consider flow type more an indicator of type of publisher than of data quality in our opinion. We have just scrapped it in the guidelines we are updating because it means nothing to the NGOs we work with and it seems only relevant to government and multilateral donors to us. In the meeting it was mentioned that this leads to issues in data use, I'd love to know more about that but I have little hope that it is used correctly by publishers.

Q1. - Q4. These make sense to us.

Q5.    The U.S. supports the policy marker related to the SDGs to the extent that it is voluntary.  As a voluntary marker, we believe it may be unsuitable to assess its use as a quality indicator. (This relates a larger issue / theme throughout this DQI feedback: is the purpose of this index to "score" publishers on measures, which implies a best practice, or to provide neutral data points? You mentioned elsewhere that it’s only to provide data points, but there must be recognition that any such index allows and encourages cross-comparison and implies best practices where they may not be universally applicable.)

Back to the technicals of assessing this measure: The cross-cutting nature of applying result oriented targets to activity data makes it extremely difficult to apply precise or meaningful percentages to SDG classifications.  If SDG reporting is measured, it should be only as a tag, not a sector classification.  

Is this measure going to differentiate between SDG assigned to an activity or the results of an activity?  

Additionally, there are certain modalities that SDGs cannot be applied, and should not be included in a measure.  For example, there is no reason to apply SDG’s to general budget support to governments or multialterals, or administrative costs among others.

Thank you for your comments and feedback. 

For the SDG measures we propose to only look at SDGs included at the activity level. There is the discussion in this thread of if SDGs included within a sector should also be included, noting that this is more applicable to UN agencies who have a mandate for doing so outside of IATI. So far, only two IATI publishers have specified SDGs at result level. Given that I'm not sure of the value of adding a SDG result check to the DQI.

As for the other comments on which measures are relevant to different subsets of publishers, these will be noted and picked up in the next round of consultation.