Country Strategy or Memorandum of Understanding

[andylolz]

Description

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

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is a document which details the agreement usually between the organisation and recipient government for the provision of aid in the country.

Note: This test has been modified since the 2016 Aid Transparency Index, to merge the country strategy and MoU indicators

Proposed test

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

Issues identified

In order to determine the proportion of recipient countries for which a publisher provides either a country strategy or MoU, we first need to ascertain the number of countries in which a publisher has activities. This was determined using a complicated method in previous years. We welcome alternative suggestions for measuring this.

[breidertmt]

Look up official numbers for the agency about where they are active at least for some agencies. This is not the same for State as not every mission is a foreign assistance mission.

[andylolz]

Thanks for this, @breidertmt – we’ll look into this further.

[YohannaLoucheur]

Have you looked into using the DAC's Survey on Donors Forward Spending Plans? Country Programmable Aid may be the best proxy
http://www.oecd.org/development/effectiveness/aidpredictability.htm

[AndieVaughn]

We agree with Meagan. Not every mission is a foreign assistance mission. Additionally, there should be a better consensus for the denominator than what is in the current country budget. We need to ensure the denominator is correct. Should organizations provide this?

Additionally, we agree that having strategies for foreign assistance missions is a best practice, and by publishing all strategies that exist, USAID is being as transparent as it can be. However, by assessing what countries SHOULD have a country strategy, PWYF is expanding their mandate to assess best practices and not the level of transparency..

[ToonVB]

Regarding Yohanna's reference to CPA: one could still better take into account (for DAC donors that is) the priority partner countries, for donors could fund projects/programs in other partner countries, without having a country budget, strategy or MoU reg. these countries, f.i. in one/off cases or exit cases. Info reg. priority partner countries per donor is collected by DAC through their yearly "forward looking indic. spending survey".

[johnadamsDFID]

In the past, has the test not used the list of country-level budgets in the organisation file? Logic being that if there is a country-level budget there should also be a strategy document. Allows orgs to determine their priority countries as mentioned above. This time without reference to an external dataset.

[andylolz]

Thanks for the feedback here.

We intend to modify this test in a few ways, in part for consistency with the disaggregated budget indicator (#9).

We will accept a country strategy paper (B03) or a country-level Memorandum of Understanding (B13). We note that donors aren’t yet using the B13 code, and appear to provide country-level MoUs alongside activities. Therefore, we’ll also accept A09 documents where applicable.

For the denominator, as for the proposed disaggregated budget test (#9), rather than determining the list of recipient countries a donor is currently working in from recipient-country-budgets, we’ll instead determine this list from current activities.

If you would like to feedback on this, please contact us directly.