Aid Transparency Tracker: Publish

This section of the Tracker looks at the quality of different organisations' aid information.

Purpose

The main purpose of this section is to analyse what information donors are currently publishing. It combines an automated assessment of data released through the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), with manually collected data in order to understand what information donors are currently making available, and in what formats.

We hope that this will be a useful resource for others trying to understand what donors are doing in order to meet their commitments to publish to a common, open standard by 2015, as well as for those who want to use the data.

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Methodology

Automated data quality assessment

Data published to the IATI Registry is machine readable and conforms to a common standard. This makes it possible to automatically collect and analyse this data, by running a series of tests against it.

These tests have been designed to assess the availability, comprehensiveness and comparability of the information and to determine whether an organisation's publication conforms to the IATI Standard. The tests have been derived from the IATI schemas.

For the purposes of the review, tests are run against current activities, defined as:

• ongoing activities
• planned end dates within the previous 12 months
• actual end dates within the previous 12 months
• transaction dates within the previous 12 months

The tests are also run against all IATI data published by an organisation. This data is not included in the review, but can be accessed on an organisation's results page.

For each test, the following analysis is provided:

• organisation level – whether the document exists;
• activity level – percentage of activities that have passed that test.

Three organisation level tests use a different scoring approach:

• total budget – whether forward budgets exist for each of the next three years;
• country budgets – the percentage of country budgets that exist for each of the next three years, as a proportion of the total budget;
• country strategy papers – the percentage of countries for which there is a current country budget, which have a country strategy paper.

Test results are then aggregated – based on the indicators they relate to – in order to produce scores for these indicators. The tests underlying the measurement of each indicator can be viewed by clicking on the detail button on the publication page for the relevant organisation.

Manual assessment

Information published in other formats that cannot be automatically assessed is collected via a survey. Surveys are completed for all organisations included in the review. Only information that is always published is scored. To establish that the information is always published at the activity level, a minimum of five activities from an organisation's largest recipient of aid are selected at random. While checking and verifying data, organisations are asked to confirm if the responses are representative as a whole.

The survey also captures the format (machine readable XML or CSV, webpages or PDF) in which the information is provided.

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More information

Full details of how the information collected will be assessed and scored is provided in the technical paper.

More details »