External resources spent in a specific quarter in country X
Author of this query: IATI Secretariat
What external resources were spent in Q4 2021 in Zimbabwe?
2. Description
Source of query (hypothetical or actual): Ministry of Finance of Zimbabwe
Intended use of the data (hypothetical or actual):
The Ministry of Finance needs data on external inflows to the country to provide to the Central Bank to feed into the quarterly calculation of Balance of Payments.
3. Steps to access and / or analyze data
Data needed: Disbursements and Expenditures in Q4 2021 with a recipient country of Zimbabwe
Data access tool(s) recommended: Country Development Finance Data
Steps suggested:
- Search for Zimbabwe and download file
- Ensure cell A1 is selected and insert PivotTable
- In PivotTable, carry out the following steps to get the aggregate spending by quarter:
- Add Calendar Year to Filters and select 2021
- Add Transaction Type to Filters and select Disbursement and Expenditure
- Add Calendar Quarter to Columns and filter to select Q4
- Add Value (USD) to Values
- To analyze the spending by another variable (e.g. Reporting Org, Sector Category, etc.), simply add this data field to Rows.
Additional Guidance is available here on how to understand and analyze the data in the spreadsheets available via the Country Development Finance Data tool.
4. Result
Analysis on resources spent in Q4 disaggregated by other variables of interest.
5. Caveats / Considerations / Challenges
- Organizations report their spending to IATI according to varying timelines (e.g. monthly, quarterly, annual) which means that the completeness of the data varies depending on when the data is retrieved.
- As multiple organizations in the delivery chain can report their spending, this likely results in some double counting of resources.
These are great on many levels - to share the kind steps needed to use IATI data, to note that double counting continues to be a huge caveat for much data use etc.
I wonder if it is worth adding a default caveat to all of these recipes to check the data-issues bugtracker here: https://github.com/codeforIATI/iati-data-bugtracker/issues for any suspicious looking sums to see if it is a known issue with that publisher?
Great suggestion, matmaxgeds . Makes me realize we could also add a link to this: https://countrydata.iatistandard.org/data-notes/#_3-2-data-gaps-by-year -- so users could check out any data gaps -- e.g. for this one to see if any major orgs aren't reporting spending (e.g. Mastercard) or haven't reported it for the year that they are interested in (e.g. WHO, UNFPA, etc.). And of course this is a quite simple (and simplified) query which just gives you the flows reported to IATI for this period -- as you note, more steps are needed to look more closely at the data and make any adjustments due to quality, double counting, etc. But this is just a starting point! We will continue to create and publish queries (hopefully walking thorugh a real example with some of these adjustments) and hope the community will do the same! Let me know if any other suggestions!
That sounds ace, and I think is worthwhile setting up as a standardised service page for users - also maybe adding the data that DDW add to their mini-query interface, that shows who is/is not reporting useable committments/disbursements data for a given year - I think that this will be one of the next frontiers to cross for data users as just making a chart from IATI data can often be technically correct but lead to untrue conclusions unless you are able to know all the quirks e.g. that publisher X did not report in year Y for some reason.
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