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OpenAgFunding / development

For developing responses to current gaps in the availability and usability of open data on funding for agriculture and food security.
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Identifying the priority fields for agricultural investment use cases #3

Open timgdavies opened 8 years ago

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

Our working assumption is that it is possible to identify a small number of core fields from IATI which are essential to meeting key use-cases for agricultural investment data.

Key use cases include:

The key questions to be addressed with IATI data are:

In addition, many user needs relate to more qualitative understanding of project needs and success factors - which may come through having associated documents.

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

To explore this more, we're going to look at this spreadsheet of data from funding to Tanzania from a range of donors, and working to:

(a) Remove fields that don't meet core needs; (b) Identify essential fields that are missing;

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

From an initial analysis, I'm discovering fields that might be seen as 'complicated', but that are often important for particular forms of analysis.

For example:

We will need to think about whether a simplified template would:

(a) Include columns (possibly hidden) for all these extra values (b) Be unable to accept this more detailed level of information (c) Allow users to set constant values when inputting, and provide constant values when outputting.

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

Observations from our conversation:

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

AidStream have managed to narrow this down in their import template to:

mikecastro commented 8 years ago

The location field is high on the user priority needs. Although it's part of AidStream's defaults (according to Github), as @timgdavies mentioned it's not a default in practice. IATI Data Quality Dashboard under the Comprehensiveness tab considers "location" as a value added field and not a core requirement. Only the Dutch government consider location as a required field for NGO recipients of their funds.

lgrino commented 8 years ago

The list below is not so much a priority list as much as a comprehensive list of the items we heard people wanted (items in italics are things folks didn't ask for but which are implied by the way in which people are interested in using the data / items in bold do not currently exist in IATI). Please add anything I may have missed!

  1. Activity identifier
  2. Activity Title
  3. Description_General
  4. Description_Objectives
  5. Description_Target_Groups (note: I'm not sure how organizations are reporting on this in IATI, but this may need to be more detailed than just "smallholder farmers" for example. Users may need more precise information about the nature of the population being targeted. @mikecastro, maybe you could review a few project documents to see if this information is available there?).
  6. Start_Date (not sure if there is a strong preference for actual or planned)
  7. End_Date (not sure if there is a strong preference for actual or planned)
  8. Funding_Participating_Organization
  9. _Funding_Participating_Organizationidentifier
  10. Implementing_Participating_Organization
  11. _Implementing_Participating_Organizationidentifier
  12. Recipient_Country
  13. Location (down to ADM2 - see #7 - this may need to be simplified)
  14. Sector (note: For the sake of comparability, it seems like a good idea to encourage the use of the DAC 5 digit codes. Those codes may need modifications - see #6)
  15. Crop or livestock type (this could potentially be a new sector vocabulary? see #2 and #4 for discussion of options)
  16. Focus of project in terms of the part of the value chain (e.g., input provision, cultivation, collection, production, export, import retail) (note: challenge here is that a standard for value chain processes doesn't seem to exist; at the same time this could potentially be solved by more granular sector codes)
  17. Transaction_Commitment
  18. Transaction_Disbursement (note: wonder whether a new transaction type for this is needed for capturing the full value of a sub-grant/contract, rather than value of disbursements in a given period. Or does planned disbursement serve this purpose?)
  19. Transaction_Expenditure
  20. Budget by location or component/objective (note: not sure that this needs to be a new field or if it could be (partially) covered by the sector percentages; maybe it's easiest to have access to a budget document?)
  21. Result_indicator (note: my impression is that even just having the indicators being used to measure progress - even without the values - might be useful)
  22. Document_link (for providing access to evaluations)
mikecastro commented 8 years ago

Yes @lgrino. Some of DFID's activities include documentation (logical framework, progress reports) that do contain information on the number of beneficiaries. This progress report from DFID's Productive Safety Net Programme II has both baseline information and the actual number of Chronically Food Insecure (CFI) Households. This logical framework provides a bit more information on the CFI Households they are targeting disaggregated (see tab 2013-FINAL-Impact&Outcome) by gender and location (lowland/highland). The question is do we need more information that describe the beneficiaries. Do we need to provide guidance on how detailed this needs to be?

stevieflow commented 8 years ago

@mikecastro is your comment more directly applicable to https://github.com/OpenAgFunding/development/issues/15 ?

(we can move, if needed)

mikecastro commented 8 years ago

@stevieflow It's in reply to @lgrino's request bullet 5 to see if project documents could get us more information for Description_Target _Groups.

stevieflow commented 8 years ago

@mikecastro @lgrino thanks - in the same manner that @timgdavies & @rolfkleef have been analysing the actual documents in #1 and #17 , I think another ACTION could be to start to run something over the `description text in our corpus...

mbacou commented 8 years ago

Here are existing IATI fields we're using in the CGIAR (in column IATI) https://github.com/OpenAgFunding/development/blob/master/codelists/CGIAR%20IATI%20Crosswalk.csv.

They are:

<other-identifier>
<title>
<activity-status>
<iati-activity @last-updated-datetime>
<iati-activity @hierarchy>
<iati-identifier>
<activity-date type="start-planned">
<activity-date type="start-actual">
<activity-date type="end-planned">
<activity-date type="end-actual">
<contact-info>
<person-name>
<job-title>
<organisation>
<reporting-org>
<reporting-org type="">
<participating-org role="">
<description>
<location><administrative @level="2" @vocabulary="A1" @code>
<location><location-reach @code>
<location><location-class>
<budget><value>
<budget><period-start><period-end>
<budget><value currency="">
<CollaborationType>
<document-link>
<activity-website>
tdavis9 commented 8 years ago

A couple more to add to Laia's list:

-Beneficiary was also important, which we don't see in IATI currently, this could be something like "Recipient-Individual type" to consider is if we would need percent going to different recipient types, and if gender would need to be it's own category or fall within the same.

-Information to add in the description could be if the project is providing goods at a discounted price or for free-this came up during the ICT4Ag event.

laurenjanebradford commented 8 years ago

Hi All,

Gabi and I have gone through Laia's list and have made the following comments below.....

Re:

  1. Would be good to know who other collaborator/s (sub grantees) are, that are not listed as primary recipient org - gets to need for understanding who is doing the work and where the funds end up
  2. Is this location of the recipient organization or of the geo area being served?
  3. Really want to see aggregate results data, but not sure what or how to do this yet?
  4. lets make this more comprehensive and go beyond evaluations to knowledge products, lessons learned, best practices, case studies etc.
  5. Additional information on recipient? I. e geo reach, capacity, type of org - including BRIDGE ID field may be the easiest and most consistent way to get organizational data

Thanks, L and G

1.Activity identifier 2.Activity Title 3.Description_General 4.Description_Objectives 5.Description_Target_Groups (note: I'm not sure how organizations are reporting on this in IATI, but this may need to be more detailed than just "smallholder farmers" for example. Users may need more precise information about the nature of the population being targeted. @mikecastro, maybe you could review a few project documents to see if this information is available there?). 6.Start_Date (not sure if there is a strong preference for actual or planned) 7.End_Date (not sure if there is a strong preference for actual or planned) 8.Funding_Participating_Organization 9.Funding_Participating_Organization_identifier 10.Implementing_Participating_Organization 11.Implementing_Participating_Organization_identifier 12.Recipient_Country 13.Location (down to ADM2 - see #7 - this may need to be simplified) 14.Sector (note: For the sake of comparability, it seems like a good idea to encourage the use of the DAC 5 digit codes. Those codes may need modifications - see #6)

  1. Crop or livestock type (this could potentially be a new sector vocabulary? see #2 and #4 for discussion of options)
  2. Focus of project in terms of the part of the value chain (e.g., input provision, cultivation, collection, production, export, import retail) (note: challenge here is that a standard for value chain processes doesn't seem to exist; at the same time this could potentially be solved by more granular sector codes) 17.Transaction_Commitment 18.Transaction_Disbursement (note: wonder whether a new transaction type for this is needed for capturing the full value of a sub-grant/contract, rather than value of disbursements in a given period. Or does planned disbursement serve this purpose?) 19.Transaction_Expenditure
  3. Budget by location or component/objective (note: not sure that this needs to be a new field or if it could be (partially) covered by the sector percentages; maybe it's easiest to have access to a budget document?) 21.Result_indicator (note: my impression is that even just having the indicators being used to measure progress - even without the values - might be useful) 22.Document_link (for providing access to evaluations)