Herb Caudill
Founder | Chief Technology Officer
202.294.7901
DevResults: A better way to manage international aid. | www.devresults.com
Catherine (and belatedly Herb)
One of the main reasons for publishing to the IATI standard is for your data to be comparable with other publishers' data. This applies as much to results as it does to geography, sectors, etc. Without commonly used indicator vocabularies reporting results through IATI has limited value. The M&E world in general appears not to appreciate the need for global standards which would allow for better comparison of results data being produced from different sources.
One good example of what this should look like is the World Health Organisation's Indicator and Measurement Registry which is "a central source of metadata of health-related indicators used by WHO and other organizations. It includes indicator definitions, data sources, methods of estimation and other information that allow users to get better understanding of their indicators of interest. It facilitates complete and well-structured indicator metadata, harmonization and management of indicator definitions and code lists, internet access to indicator definitions, and consistency with other statistical domains."
From: iati-te...@googlegroups.com [mailto:iati-te...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Catherine Marschner
Sent: 02 March 2015 05:39
To: iati-te...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [IATI Tech] Re: Disaggregated results data
All - MCC would also like to look at publishing our results data in a greater disaggregated format, particularly by gender. Our own systems can handle multiple disaggregation types but we just post the rolled up data to IATI. Would love to have some conversations about ways to do this!
On Friday, January 16, 2015 at 12:27:41 PM UTC-5, Herb Caudill wrote:One other question on reporting results data via IATI, this one probably a bit thornier than the issue of indicator identifiers.
Typically, implementers are asked to disaggregate reported results data in various ways. The most common attributes are demographic (gender, age, ethnicity) but there's no end to the possibilities. Just a few examples:
- Yields, disaggregated by crop type (soybeans, cassava, groundnuts, etc)
- Training, disaggregated by organization type (NGO, government agency, private firm, etc)
- Individuals reached by a public information campaign, disaggregated by media type (TV, radio, print, etc)
- Individuals treated, disaggregated by HIV status (positive, negative, unknown)
- Individuals treated, disaggregated by treatment regimen (sdNVP, AZT+sdNVP, ART)
It doesn't seem at all realistic to come up with any sort of universal codelist since the possibilities are literally endless; we're often forced to just match on text, with the aid of an internal thesaurus for synonyms (e.g. M = Man = Men = Male = Homme etc.)
In many legacy systems that we've dealt with, disaggregations are treated as separate indicators (e.g. "1.1a Men trained" vs
"1.1b Women trained"). This is a very messy approach and I'd hope we wouldn't have to re-introduce it here.
Further complicating things, when data is disaggregated by more than one attribute, you have two possible approaches, both about equally common in the real world:
1. Parallel disaggregation
Male
Female
Total
Child
Adult
Total
20
30
50
10
40
50
2. Cross-disaggregation (preferable because it captures more information)
Male
Female
Total
Child
Adult
Child
Adult
10
20
5
15
50
Has there been any discussion on how to incorporate disaggregation into the IATI indicator element? If not, we'd be happy to draft a proposal, since this is a problem that we've already had to work through in our own software product.
Cheers
Herb Caudill
Founder | Chief Technology Officer
202.294.7901DevResults: A better way to manage international aid. | www.devresults.com
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Hi Herb
Not clumsy at all. This is very useful.
The formal way to go about this is to post in the Modifications, Additions, Improvements forum on the IATI Consultations Knowledge Base. Could you post the three proposals separately so that they can be processed and tracked more easily.
I also think this merits a session at the next Technical Advisory Group meeting. It would be worth posting a proposal on the What Next? Theme.
As to your proposals:
1.
Support an element referencing an indicator vocabulary and an indicator code within that vocabulary.
I support this 100%. An optional vocabulary attribute could be introduced in the next
decimal upgrade. Some work will need to be done to create a core code list of recognised vocabularies.
2.
Add geographic disaggregation to the results standard, as well as adding elements for disaggregating results data into other categories
I also support this 100% but I don't see a way of doing this that maintains the backward compatibility of the standard. This means that we cannot consider this until the
next integer upgrade which is unlikely to happen until 2016.
3.
Add an indicator schema to the IATI standard
I agree that there is a desperate need for such a standard. However I do not think that this is IATI's responsibility. Furthermore the content of this standard will need
curation that is beyond IATI's knowledge and remit. This, I believe, is a problem for the M&E community to tackle - and we would support any attempt at a solution wholeheartedly.
Best
Bill