Initiative for Open Ag Funding

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Jane Norton
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Initiative for Open Ag Funding Recommendations for publishers, intermediaries and the IATI Standard April 2017 How can the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) be used to collate and

1 Initiative for Open Ag Funding Recommendations for publishers, intermediaries and the IATI Standard April 2017 How can the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) be used to collate and communicate information on investments in agriculture and food security, and to inform better decision making that ultimately impacts addressing hunger and poverty? This document summarises five focus areas for action to improve data quality, and enhance use of the IATI standard for sharing open information on agriculture funding. It builds upon the landscape analysis, user research, and initial draft recommendations 1 of the Initiative for Open Ag Funding. Each section contains: What we have done, or will be doing, in this focus area Suggestions or change requests for the IATI standard and documentation. What agriculture and food security funders need to do in order to participate fully in the Initiative for Open Ag Funding. Existing or future actions for the developers of data input, output and analysis tools and services 1 All documents and resources are available via the Initiative website:

2 Contents Focus 1: Data coverage and quality requirements 3 Focus 2: Activity classification 4 Focus 3: Location information 5 Focus 4: Traceability 6 Focus 5: Results 6 Appendices: 9 Classifications and IATI data 9

3 Focus 1: Data coverage and quality requirements Through our user consultations we identified the key questions that donors, NGOs and project partners are asking about agricultural investments. We have then explored the data they need to answer these questions. Put simply, organisations need detailed information on what is being funded, the location of activities, the populations being served, which organisations are involved, how much is being provided and spent, and the results achieved. All of this data can be supplied using the structured IATI standard, and over 500 organisations are already publishing IATI data. However, in practice many publishers only provide partial information, excluding fields such as detailed organisation identifiers, document links, clear descriptions or sub-national locations. We have identified 20 core components of IATI that, when provided, allow the majority of agriculture funding-related user-needs to be addressed. These can be divided into three groups: Meta-Data Core IATI Enhanced Data Important for interoperability. Often possible to set as constant values in the software used to publish data. Activity ID, Activity Status, Default currency and language, Reporting Organisation, Aid Classifications Part of the basic IATI standard. These fields are commonly available in existing databases of funding or investments. Activity Title, Activity Descriptions, Activity Dates, Budget, Location (Country/region), Transactions Fields or quality requirements specifically mentioned as necessary by the Agriculture and Food Security community. Providing these may involve some additional steps to collect or re-code information. Participating organisations, Contact details, Sub-national location, Transaction classification, Transaction parties, Transaction traceability, Results information These make up our Open Ag Funding data quality framework which can be used to assess how far data will meet the full breadth of user needs, and to plan improvements to data quality with publishers and tool-builders. Documenting the quality framework with clear examples; Creating a simple spreadsheet template to allow non-iati publishers to produce good quality data; Working with publishers to improve their data, and documenting the process; Creating tools to make it easier to publish high quality data on the identified fields; Incorporate a rule-set for validation against Open Ag Funding quality framework into the core validator. Assess current IATI publication against the quality framework; Prioritise publication of the components requested in the quality framework. Make sure that IATI tools support data exploration and analysis against all elements of the quality framework;

4 Focus 2: Activity classification Understanding the crops, technologies and value-chains targeted by funding is vital to achieve a full understanding of agriculture investment, supporting co-ordination between donors, and enabling identification of projects, partners and funding gaps. IATI supports the use of sector classifications, with the <sector> element used for: Activity discovery - searching for any activities tagged with a specific sector; Statistical analysis - calculating how much of the value of an activity should be apportioned to particular sectors when reporting on allocations and spend; Although most IATI publishers currently use the OECD DAC code list for sector classification of activities, it is possible for activities to be classified against multiple codelists. Through engagement with the FAO, GODAN and other partners we have identified the multilingual thesaurus AGROVOC as a suitable existing source of terms for detailed agriculture-specific activity classification. Through pilot work, we have demonstrated how AGROVOC classifications can be used in additional IATI <sector> codes. We are engaging with the Global Agricultural Concept Scheme (GACS) which incorporates components of AGROVOC to explore whether this may supercede AGROVOC as the most appropriate classification scheme in future 2. To aid the creation of user-friendly interfaces for tagging activities with AGROVOC terms, we are working to identify the key classification questions that may be asked for any activity, and the points in the AGROVOC hierarchy from which terms could be drawn. Does this activity focus on a particular kind of crop? Does this activity focus on a particular form of processing? Does this activity focus on a particular form of product? Does this activity have a particular technology focus? Does this activity have a specific nutrition focus? We note that in some cases, it is only possible to tag activities with these additional sector codes (for example, when applying auto-classification based on descriptive text), and that percentages for statistical analysis cannot always be provided. In these cases, IATI guidance concerning whether <sector> classifications should add up to 100% contains some ambiguity that needs to be addressed. Learning and updates: In our earlier proposals we placed emphasis on sectoral classification at the transaction level, allowing each payment to have a particular agricultural focus indicated (and allowing inference about the participating organisations also named in those transactions). Through initial pilot work we have identified that, whilst this provides much richer information about the thematic focus of particular spending, it is difficult for donors to provide this information, and so it is not a 2 Mappings are available between AGROVOC and GACS.

5 viable focus area during Develop a detailed paper on use of AGROVOC and GACS for more detailed activity classification Clarify the guidance concerning whether each sector vocabulary requires percentages; Explore opportunities to work with GODAN for ongoing maintenance of a classification list; Classify agriculture activities against the AGROVOC extract proposed by the Open Ag Funding project; Support enhanced tagging of agricultural activities during data input; Use the AGROVOC thesaurus to provide search and browse interfaces onto appropriately categorised data; Focus 3: Location information Agriculture data users want detailed sub-national location information that will support analysis of the particular areas where activities are being delivered, as well as enabling enriched location analysis, such as search via agro-ecological zone. Publishing detailed location information as structured geo-data is often challenging because: It is not collected by organisations as a matter of course; The project and finance databases used to publish aid data often lack a geocoding component; There are gaps in the availability of second level administrative boundary data and codelists. Although tools, such as the Development Gateway Open Aid Geocoder exist to augment existing datasets with activity information, the current structure of IATI data publication (with datasets from source linked to from a central registry), makes merging in externally enhanced data difficult. Often the organisations with the greatest knowledge of sub-national delivery locations for a project are those involved in project activity on the ground. This highlights an important connection between traceability and improved data: with the potential to collect location data from implementers, as opposed to head-office or county-office donor staff. Develop user-focussed guidance to assist publishers in producing highquality geodata. Explore how enhanced data can be made more accessible. Collect detailed location information; Explore collection of location data as part of traceability activities. Support visualisation and search on the basis of sub-national location data; Consider integrating additional location data (e.g. agro-ecological zones).

6 Focus 4: Traceability For any one activity, there may be multiple parties involved, and multiple layers of delivery. Understanding all the parties to an agricultural investment, how funding flows, and how results are achieved, is important to build up a full picture of agricultural investments. The way traceability information is captured in IATI, it is not about following the money from transaction to transaction (incoming transactions are allocated to an activity, which may then combine them with other funds, before outgoing transactions show funds flowing onwards), but instead offers a way to understand the delivery chain of an activity. At present, many IATI publishers: Lack traceability features in their data, or provide data with broken traceability links; Fail to provide detailed organisation identifiers and names (for example, naming Local NGO rather than the specific organisation involved in delivery of a project). Providing detailed organisation information is particularly important to answer questions about organisations that are active in a particular sector, or for locating potential partners. We have been exploring how the IATI Organisation Registration Agency codelist, and organisation identifier guidance, can be strengthened to encourage improve publication of organisation information. Recent work by Zimmerman and Zimmerman has also demonstrated the potential to use traceability data to provide multiple perspectives on a single activity - and to combine information from multiple sources to understand the thematic focus (classification), locations, and participating organisations for a particular delivery chain. We ve also begun - in dialogue with existing donors - to explore how information on the contracting process (via the Open Contracting Data Standard) could expose far greater supply chain information. Contribute to the development of the org-id list of lists to make it easier to identify all the participating organisations in an activity Explore in more depth data and standard links between IATI and Open Contracting Adopting the shared org-id list of organisation registration lists; Improve guidance on traceability. Including information on all known participating organisations; Work with upstream and downstream partners to make sure links are made between transactions and activities. Developing tools to support collection of information from downstream partners ; Ensure data access tools are traceability aware - to avoid doublecounting, and to infer extra information about donor activities. Focus 5: Results Whilst donors use many different results frameworks, metrics and measurements for their projects, it is possible to use results data to:

7 Identify the targets that a project is working towards; Gain a sense of projects that are on-target or off-target according to their own goals; Explore learning and insights from a single project that may be applicable in other contexts. By thinking of results as a search facet as well as a way of showing impact their use is greatly enhanced. For example, an Open Ag Funding user may wish to search for all the projects that have targets related to smallholders, regardless of the exact metric being used to measure those results. The IATI standard provides three ways of providing information about intended or achieved result: By describing the objectives and target groups for an activity; Through attached evaluation documents; Through the structured results element. We encourage publishers to use each of these elements as far as possible, even if only able to provide targets and not outcome measures in the first instance. Learning and updates: In our initial recommendations, results data was only included in the list of desired data fields for publishers. However, via investigation and discussion we believe that results represent a sufficiently relevant focal point. In turn, we are minded that whilst results have been included in the IATI standard since its inception, the scope of the data published has been minimal to warrant enough focus on the relevance of the standard to accommodate a range of needs. Hence, we have included this focus area as an additional stimulus for this development to happen. Document approaches to the publication of results data; Explore ways of automatically extracting structured results data from donor documents. Provide a clear description of objectives and target groups; Provide evaluation type documents for each activity; Publish the targets for each activity using the results elements. None required Explore use of results as a search facet; Display results data in activity interfaces; Make it easier to upload or import results data.

Discussion: strengthening the IATI ecosystem In the sections above we have outlined how IATI can be used to achieve the goals of the Initiative for Open Ag Funding.

8 Discussion: strengthening the IATI ecosystem In the sections above we have outlined how IATI can be used to achieve the goals of the Initiative for Open Ag Funding. This can be achieved with minimal adaptations to the core IATI standard. However, it does require updates in how it is used - and a stronger emphasis on providing information relevant for agriculture and food-security focussed users. We have also found that, in order to meet the short-term needs of the Open Ag Funding initiative, it may require actions to enhance data post-publication. At present, the IATI ecosystem is designed around the idea that data must always be improved at source. I.e. if a donor does not publish information about their activities, but someone else can add this (either through manual or automated processing of the data), it is difficult for this to make it into downstream tools and services. Drawing on our work with tool-builders, and in our next phase of work we will be exploring alternative approaches to enhance data, where data storage layers may include a level of data enhancement, rather than solely republication of existing data, with feedback loops from tool users to the data stores they use, and from those stores back to IATI publishers for validation, correction, and republication.

9 Appendices: Classifications and IATI data A consistent user story from our research has been what is this activity about?. Faced with description text, documents and multiple financial and results data for a single project, it can be an arduous task for the user to quickly gather insight around the precise nature of any activity. Of course, some activities may lack all such contextual data, making this question even harder. One mechanism already built into the IATI standard is the facility for organisations to add codes based on established lists, via the <sector> element and several other more limited classifications such as <finance-type> and <aid-type>. When the IATI standard was first developed, these mechanisms were a direct implementation of the equivalent lists in the OECD-DAC CRS reporting framework. Hence, the availability of the OECD-DAC Purpose Code list (renamed in IATI to Sector) provided organisations with a ready mechanism to reformat and publish the data that had received significant time and attention already. However, in our user research, we often found that the lack of granularity of the OECD-DAC derived codelists would not enable specific questions to be answered. For example how many projects are funded in Tanzania that work with Cashew Nuts presents a dynamic that is difficult to answer directly through the generalised codes available at the Sector level. With this in mind, we engaged the FAO, and partners, to investigate granular classifications that would enable more Ag-specific classifications. Indeed, our initial investigation (link to paper) highlighted that one such vocabulary, AGROVOC, could indeed facilitate this. Indeed, the IATI standard does support use of multiple vocabularies. This led us to investigate how any organisation could start to classify any IATI activity at both the general and specific level, together. However, technical capacity within the standard may not actually equate to useful data at both production and use level. With this in mind, we investigated this in the context of the fact that classifications can have different use cases. This is an important distinction, which we would like to draw out: - I wish to classify an activity for statistical purposes - to aggregate data (for example) - I wish to classify an activity to enable discovery - so people can find it (for example) We believe these two use cases for classifications represent a dilemma in the IATI landscape - which may not be best answered together. This dilemma is partly down to the rules surrounding attribute of the sector element, which state that All reported sectors from the same vocabulary MUST add up to 100%. This is intuitive when the intended use of the sector element is statistical. How else could you correctly allocate funds to different sectors without knowing what proportion of those funds were split between multiple sectors? However, when a publisher is declaring that their project is relevant to cashews, or a particular agricultural process, the point isn t necessarily to sum up the relevant funds, but just to tag that activity in the relevant way.

10 This lead to the following question: how could the IATI standard change to accommodate these dual requirements for classification? Well, in fact, there is actually no specification in the IATI Activity Standard Schema that stipulates that secondary sectors (i.e. additional sectors from another vocabulary) have to have percentage declarations, only the Rules & Guidance says this. As such, one option would just be to relax these rules, so that the following would be acceptable IATI data: <sector vocabulary="dac" code="31140"percentage="100"> <narrative>irrigation And Drainage</narrative> </sector> <sector vocabulary="99" vocabulary-uri=" code="c_10967"> <narrative xml:lang="en">food security</narrative> </sector> <sector vocabulary="99" vocabulary-uri=" code="c_37836"> <narrative xml:lang="en">capacity building</narrative> </sector> <sector vocabulary="99" vocabulary-uri=" code="c_24935"> <narrative xml:lang="en">off season cultivation</narrative> </sector> Here, the initial OECD DAC CRS Purpose code is declared as 100%, and the secondary codes are not required to add up at all, but add as tags rather than aggregation-apt sectors. This is the least disruptive option because it doesn t require a change in the IATI Schema, meaning that it wouldn t require a major update to the Standard.

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