The IATI Dashboard – Simple statistics on how IATI publishers are doing

  • May 12, 2016

If you’ve never looked at the IATI Dashboard, now’s the chance to learn how to have a good dig about in the statistics we generate on how all IATI publishers are faring on data quality and see at a glance whether the data that’s being produced is useful. So if you’ve ever wondered whether someone’s data is up to date, or if you can see what their planned budgets are for 2018, here’s how!

Every night the Dashboard checks through everyone’s data and looks for changes so it can update itself, meaning that it’s an excellent real time barometer of how all publishers are doing on the four dimensions of good IATI data – timeliness, forward-looking, comprehensiveness and coverage. Let’s look at what these mean in simple terms:

Timeliness

This is made up of two things:

  • How often a publisher updates their data (frequency)
  • How old the data is (time lag)

The Frequency table on the Dashboard shows a column for each of the last twelve months and a figure to show how many days that publisher changed their transaction dates in each month. The last column shows an overall assessment of how often a publisher is updating their data, based on these criteria. You can sort the table by publisher name, overall frequency, or by month. There is a column for the current month but this is not included in the overall assessment. The same applies for Time Lag.

Forward-looking

Put simply, forward-looking information means whether the publisher has provided budgets for the current year and two subsequent years for their IATI activities. The Dashboard Forward-looking table lets you look at how many ‘live’ activities a particular publisher has at the beginning of a year, how many of these have budgets attached to them and then calculates a percentage. You can sort on either the number / percentage or by year.

Comprehensiveness

The Dashboard provides a summary of three different areas of publishers’ data, as well as the individual statistics on each individual area.

  • Core – as the name suggests, these are what we think are the most important bits of information to include in an IATI activity
  • Financials – key transaction and budget information
  • Value added – fields that make IATI data richer and more useful

The Comprehensiveness table on the Dashboard shows a weighted average across the three areas listed above, as well as an average for each area. You can also dig into the individual areas in more detail on the links above.

Coverage

Coverage refers to what percentage of expenditure is being reported to IATI by each organisation. To calculate this, we look at the total spend amount reported to IATI by an organisation in a given year and then compare it with an external source to get a percentage coverage score. The Coverage table on the Dashboard can be sorted by IATI spend, reference spend (from the external source) and the resulting coverage ratio and percentage.

The Global Partnership Transparency Indicator

Last December marked the deadline for signatories of the 2011 Busan Partnership Agreement to meet their commitment to a ‘common, open standard for electronic publication of timely, comprehensive and forward-looking information on resources provided through development co-operation’.

Since 2011, much progress has been made. Many development actors, including Busan signatories, have published data to the IATI Standard and the focus is now on making this data more usable by driving up its quality. The Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) is tasked with assessing the transparency of development cooperation from Busan signatories, producing a revised methodology for its assessment. IATI data forms part of the data considered in the Global Partnership Transparency Indicator and this will be taken from the Dashboard statistics calculated according to our own methodology.

So if your organisation endorsed the Busan Agreement and also publishes IATI data, information will be taken from the Dashboard on 31 May 2016 to contribute to the Indicator scores. Organisations affected will be contacted directly by both the GPEDC Joint Support Team and the IATI Secretariat.

Do you have any questions? Email the IATI Technical Team on [email protected].

Would you like to share your views on how we calculate these statistics? If so, get involved in the discussions here.