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{iati}

Objective

A data package with UNHCR contribution to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) that aims at:

  • reshaping IATI extraction from a complex xml file structure to a more user-friendly tabular format with necessary look-up code tables
  • offer easy to consume documentation on the data structure
  • provide built-in ggplot2 visualization, aka a “chart library” around high level key questions on UNHCR programme. Those visualizations can be integrated in Operation Situation Analysis or Protection Monitoring Analysis.

Install 

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pkg_install("unhcr-americas/iati")

Context

Extracting information from IATI can assist governments to plan and manage their budgets; parliamentarians and citizens to better hold governments accountable; community-based organisations to influence how resources are used; and journalists, researchers and activists to investigate the use and impact of the resources.

Information from Global Focus is translated into the IATI open data standard and published using UNHCR’s IATI identifier: XM-DAC-41121. An overview of the publication process is accessible through IATI Dashboard. Every UNHCR operation world-wide is reported on for each year from 2016. This includes financial information (budget, contributions, disbursements and expenditure), office locations, and results at various levels of activity. Activities for 2019 and onwards are be published as soon as possible after they become available. This current package is updated a much as possible….

What is IATI?

Launched in Accra in 2008, the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is a multi-stakeholder initiative and international open data standard that aims to improve the transparency and openness of both development and humanitarian activities. In the 2016 Humanitarian grand Bargain, multiple organisations also committed to “Publish timely, transparent, harmonised and open high-quality data on humanitarian funding within two years of the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul” noting that parties “consider IATI to provide a basis for the purpose of a common standard.”

IATI provides a mechanism for the regular, automated publication of open data on financial flows and also enables organizations to publish information on their project or programming activities, including information on monitoring, evaluation and results. Overall, 1000+ humanitarian and development organisations, including government donors, multilateral and UN agencies and international and local NGOs currently use the IATI Standard to publish information on who funds them, where the money goes and the impact or outcome of their activities. The use of IATI for Humanitarian actors is among the commitment from the grand bargain as presented in the dedicated portal.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data to trace aid flows from donor treasuries to their final end use. IATI is designed so that people can trace development spending flows through the development implementation chain, from one organization to other organizations, right down to the final stage in the chain: spending on goods and services. Traceability in IATI works by following the money as it flows from organization to organization through the development implementation chain. Provided that all organizations publish their information, it is possible to assess how much of the total funding at the beginning of the implementation chain is spent on goods and services, and where the money is spent.

Data published to IATI is published in activity units, the core building blocks of the data. Activities are usually projects, but they can be any unit of development cooperation as defined by the publisher, such as a program or a contract. Typically,an entire donor country program is made up of a number of activities. Each activity is given a unique identifier and contains details of all incoming and outgoing transactions. Each transaction also has a unique identifier and contains data covering,among other things,the date, the value, a description, and details about the provider and receivers of the funds. It is classified into one of three categories.

Disbursement: Outgoing funds placed at the disposal of a recipient government or organization, or funds transferred between two separately reported activities. Under IATI traceability standards the recipient of a disbursement should also be required to report their activities to IATI.

Expenditure: Outgoing funds spent directly on goods and services for the activity. The recipients of expenditures fall outside of IATI traceability standards and are considered to be the end of the implementation chain. Therefore, an expenditure provided to a non-country-based organization is considered to be funds `not reaching the country.

Incoming fund: Funds received for an activity, which can be from an external or internal source.

Organisations can have different roles in IATI (each of them being segregated into different “Organisation Types”): * Reporting Organisations, i.e. organisations voluntarily reporting about their aid projects * Implementations organisations, that actually implements the activity.

The main concept are summarized in the table below from IFRC IATI Feasibility Study - see also the Appendices

The diagram below provides also a summary of the main topics covered through IATI:

Key Visualisation on UNHCR Programme in the library (work-in-progress)

  • What are the most funded sectors per country (Expenditure evolution per impact /outcome area)?
  • Who are the main donors by country in terms of number of projects and/or total budget?
  • Who are the main implementing partners by country in terms of number of projects and/or total budget?
  • What’s the breakdown of Earmarking Type (Un-earmarked, Tightly earmarked, etc.) from Donor Funds by Year?
  • What’s the level of partnership between organisations when implementing projects?
  • How much expenditures compare to the initial budget (weighted by # PoCs / GPP in the country)?
  • How much indicators evolve over time against thresholds?

Out of Scope: Humanitarian Funding at large

This package only includes UNHCR Data, as such the following questions can not be adressed:

  • What is the share of funds received by different UN Agencies (UNICEF, WFP, IOM, UNDP, UNOCHA)?
  • How much donors balance resources between different humanitarian crisis?
  • How much donors allocate budget between humanitarian and development programmes devoted to displacement crisis by key donors/region
  • How much of donors funding goes to migratory vs refugee issues?
  • What’s the share of ODA (Official Development Assistance) among the total flow of foreign aid per country?
  • What’s the share of ODA going to benefit of refugees? (this can complement the measurement of Global Refugee Compact Indicators related to ODA)
  • What is the share of ODA allocated to national actors?
  • What’s the share of Humanitarian assistance within the total ODA?

Contribute

The package includes different tables (data, code & reference) together with a series of visualization functions, aka a “chart library”“, (show) based on ggplot2

This package is built with the help of fusen package which allow to easily maintain consistent documentation through a single notebook.

fusen::inflate(flat_file = "dev/dev_unhcr_programme.Rmd", vignette_name = "UNHCR Programme")