Country strategy

[markbrough]

Description A country strategy paper sets out the organisation’s planned approach and activities in the recipient country.

2013 Index test

Approach This is a hard test to design, because the only available list of countries in which an organisation works, is the list of <recipient-country-budget>s. This may or may not be a complete list. For the purposes of this indicator, we also looked at current budgets (not just future budgets).

the percentage of countries for which there is a current country budget, which have a country strategy paper

If there was no text provided for the <recipient-country-budget> (e.g. in the case of Canada), then the code attribute was used to look up a name against a simplified English-language list of the ISO country codes. This name was then compared with the titles of the country strategy papers.

Expression This is a complicated test, which had to be written directly in the code.

Issues

1. Donors that publish country strategy papers, but do not report a <recipient-country-budget> for that country, do not score for this indicator.
2. Donors that use names for countries in the title of their strategy papers, that do not correspond to the name of the country used in the <recipient-country-budget> do not score for this indicator. The IATI Standard does not permit ISO-codes to be used to code up country strategy papers, so they can only be identified by trying to match the titles. This could be increasingly problematic as more publishers begin to publish in languages other than English. We have proposed a change to the IATI Standard to address this issue.
3. A recognisable name for the country may not be used by the publisher in the title of a country strategy paper, in which case this gets ignored.

Questions

1. Is there a way to simplify this test?
2. Is it possible to unlink <recipient-country-budget> from this test? What other list (which would provide a list of all organisations included in the Index) would be used for the countries in which a donor operates?
3. How can we avoid having to compare names of countries and titles of documents?

2014 Index test This test is difficult to design, and the test as it stands has some issues. We would like to improve the test if technically possible.

However, unless specific alternatives are suggested, we will be unable to change this test in 2014. See also our proposals for sampling documents in #39.

[ErinCoppin]

The best solution is to allow country strategies (and other relevant documents) to be coded with country codes in the IATI standard. I would encourage donors and the IATI Secretariat to prioritise this as a way of making information more immediately useful.

The question of defining the universe against which to compare the published country strategies in the meantime is difficult. One option would be generating a list from the IATI data of all the countries in which a donor has activities - does the donor then have strategies for all these countries? This remains problematic since donors may not publish all activities to IATI. It is worth considering whether donors could be asked to provide a definitive list directly to PWYF (since it is helpful for both this test and the disaggregated budgets test). Donors providing information to the IATI standard should not be adverse to providing this list in principle. In the absence of a definitive list from donors of the countries in which they work, the recipient country budget tag is the best alternative.

For the 2014 Index, in the absence of other changes or lists from donors, I think it makes sense to compare a sample of country strategies by hand to see if this approach still makes sense.

[johnadamsDFID]

I agree that given the current version of the standard we cannot identify specific country strategy papers. We are content with the test as it stands. For a donor it implies that for each country, we need both a current-year budget and a strategy/business plan paper for that country.

[YohannaLoucheur]

This indicator suffers from the same weakness than the "Disaggregated budget" (ie country budgets) one - it tries to compare what is published against what "should be" published, but does not have a solid method to determine the universe of reference.

One way to determine this universe may be to ask partner countries which donors are active in their country e.g. which donors are listed in their AIMS, which ones are part of the donor coordination mechanisms etc. It may be fair to expect these donors (or perhaps the top 10, or 15) to have a country strategy and/or country budget. Perhaps this approach could be piloted with a small number of partner countries in 2014 to see if it yields adequate information.

We would advice against trying to establish the list by looking at the countries appearing in donor IATI files. There can be many reasons why a country would not have a corresponding budget and strategy. For instance, a country may be in the file because it's part of a regional initiative, or of a multi-country project delivered by an NGO (something quite common in Canada's business model) - yet not have its own bilateral program/strategy/budget. Such an approach could penalize donors who provide multi-country coding, and result in less precise data.

[markbrough]

Thanks for all the comments.

For 2014:

The approach for this indicator will remain the same as in 2013. While recognising the limitations of this approach, we have not found a better methodology that works across all organisations.

Organisations should use the same name in the title of their country strategy papers, as they use in the recipient country budget. If they are using only ISO-country codes, they should use an English-language name of the country in the title of the country strategy paper document-link.

Notes

We considered other sources to generate lists of the countries that organisations currently operate in. However, it was impossible to find a list of all of the countries that each organisation currently works in.

[bill-anderson]

For the future: It has been agreed that IATI v2.01 needs to address this. I've put a place-holder here: http://support.iatistandard.org/entries/44312117-Changes-to-Country-Reporting-in-the-Organisation-Standard