Country strategy

[markbrough]

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

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

Issues

1. Version 2.01 of the IATI Standard now allows a recipient country code to be provided alongside a document to explicitly state which country it is related to.
2. Version 2.01 of the IATI Standard now allows sectoral strategy papers and sectoral budgets (under budget-line) to be published.

2016 Aid Transparency Index test We are planning to change this test in two ways:

1. Check whether a recipient country code is explicitly stated alongside a country strategy paper, and if so, use the data to compare with recipient country budgets.
2. If no country strategy papers or country budgets are published, then look for sectoral strategy papers in the following way: check whether, for each budget-line under the total budget, there exists a sectoral strategy paper. The title of that sectoral strategy paper must include the title of the budget line. See the example below.

Total budget, including a budget-line for each sectoral budget - in this example, "Global Health"

<total-budget>
   <period-start iso-date="2015-01-01" />
   <period-end iso-date="2015-12-31" />
   <value currency="USD" value-date="2015-01-01">1000</value>
   <budget-line ref="1234">
    <value currency="USD" value-date="2015-01-01">20</value>
    <narrative>Global Health</narrative>
   </budget-line>
</total-budget>

Related sectoral strategy paper

<document-link format="application/msword" url="http://example.com/global-health-strategy.doc">
   <title>
    <narrative>Global Health strategy</narrative>      
   </title>
   <category code="B11" />
   <language code="en" />
</document-link>

[rachelrank]

As with the disaggregated budgets test, this change allows for publishers that organise themselves by sector rather than country. It appears to be a relevant update in line with v 2.01.

[jamieattard]

The guidance indicates that ‘For organisations such as IFIs, philanthropic organisations and vertical funds which may not have country-level strategies, mid-level documents between organisation and activity-level are accepted, e.g. thematic or sectoral level documents.’ Is there a way to acknowledge our thematic strategies despite being unable to publish a budget?

[markbrough]

Hi @jamieattard --

As discussed above, this was a difficult test to design. The key challenge is knowing the list of countries (or in this case, sectors) for which there should be a related strategy document. When we consulted on this in 2014, we did not receive any other suggestions about how else we could obtain such a list.

If there's no future budget for a specific sector, you could publish the budget for the current year for that sector. We use both current and future budgets to obtain the list of countries for which there should be a strategy, and we would do the same for sector strategies.

If you publish a current budget for a sector you would not score for the disaggregated budget indicator (as that requires forward budgets), but it would become possible to score for the strategy document.