I have been doing some investigation into the use of the XI identifiers for civil society organisations/networks. I’ll write it up properly, but I just wanted to open up some thoughts that I have had.
IATI organisation identifiers are unique to each organisation and their function is to tag an activity back to the organisation. But an IATI organisation ID is also another tool for data users to help them identify an organisation from the details in the ID, and thus to show the organisation is who they say they are. This is important because anecdoctally we are hearing that funders and international NGOs are using IATI data to find partner organisations.
The organisation identifier rules are here but generally this has been handed over to org-id.guide, a service hosted by Open Data Services Cooperative in the UK.
I’d like to flag up the growth in issuing XI-IATI- identifiers to national and sub-national level NGOs (NNGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs). Funders are pushing for transparency of the delivery chain and at the same time increasing funding directly to NNGOs/CSOs, which means that there’s a new market in NNGOs and CSOs having an IATI ID. Whilst most NNGOs and CSOs in countries with stable registration systems will have an IATI ID, XI-IATI- are being issued where the org-id.guide team cannot find out how NNGOs/CSOs are registered/deemed legitimate in country contexts that do not have easily accessible/online registration systems.
My challenge is therefore: how can we serve NNGOs/CSOs in these contexts better and ensure that they own a unique ID that reflects their reality and also provides the useful information to data users?
This is an important challenge not just for IATI, but for all the other data standards that use the org-id.guide to generate unique IDs for organisations. I know that the org-id.guide is on the surface just a centralised list of registries, but there is a risk of excluding NNGOs and CSOs from being properly identified, if this challenge is not solved.
Reviewing the list of XI-IATI identifiers and looking at the org-id.guide issues list on Github, I worked on the premise that the majority of CSOs that need identifiers, will need them because they are receiving funding. Therefore they will have a bank account or their nearest family member will have a bank account. To have a bank account they will need to be a registered entity. This also holds true for international networks and alliances that are receiving funding. If an organisation does not meet this criteria, it’s perhaps enough to be named in the funder’s data and not have an IATI organisation identifier.
In the 30 minutes I had to do a review, I found two organisations which could legitimately have a unique ID.
The first is, I think, a legacy issue. The network CABI has the identifier XI-IATI-CABI. However a search on the UK Companies House shows that it has the registration number 1973924.
The second is a recent org-id.guide issue for Somalia Family Services. ODSC were unable to find a registry in Puntland, Somalia, that was suitable, so ODSC closed the issue and handed the request back to the IATI technical team to issue an XI-IATI identifier. However, a quick search shows that Somalia Family Services is a US registered organisation, and the Puntland organisation is a locally registered operational office:
The United States based Somali Family Services here after referred to as “SFS” is a non‐profit organization headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota registered under Federal Act 501(C3) and a leading Somali capacity enhancement entity, locally registered with the Ministry of Planning and Local Government in Garowe, Puntland
At the very least, Somalia Family Services could use the US-EIN number of the US office, which would show that the organisation is who they say they are. Even better, the US organisation should be able to provide advice on how their Puntland office is registered with the government which would help build up the list for Somalia.
I am still thinking through the solutions to this challenge. My feeling is that it includes the engagement of national NNGO and CSO networks to advise IATI and org-id.guide. At the very least by acting now, we can ensure that organisations take ownership of their own unique IDs rather than accepting the default of XI-IATI identifiers.
What do you think?
Hi Yohanna
YohannaLoucheur:I work on the Org-ID team at Open Data Services. We do ask for evidence of organisations’ status when supporting them with identifier requests. We are often working with photocopies of certificates and forms and so on.
However the problem we are coming up against is that being legally registered does not mean that the organisation has a unique, persistent, stable ID conferred on it. It very much depends on the particular business and administrative processes in a given country, how digitized they are and how transparent they are. There may not be a ‘list’ which is missing from Org-ID that simply needs adding.
I hope that helps clarify the situations we are finding and why more XI-IATI- identifiers are being issued.
Yet, the fact that there isn’t a searchable list does not mean that we could not use the number issued to the organisation to generate a better identifier than XI-IATI. Org-ID can figure out what the ID string would be in that country and document it on Org-ID. A huge benefit of such an approach would be to generate identifiers that would convey more useful information (e.g. country) and be usable across open data standards.
In addition, there are examples when an XI-IATI number was assigned to something that was not a registered organisation/legal entity.
Again, I welcome the discussion opened by SJohns , especially as we collectively think about IATI’s strategic priorities in support of the 2030 Agenda. It’s a good opportunity to examine whether our approach to assign identifiers, while expedient in the short term from a publishing perspective, is supportive of our longer-term vision.
I do think the whole XI-IATI approach needs to be rethought.
Hi Johanna
I work on org-id (not on IATI at present) at Open Data Services Co-operative.
YohannaLoucheur:This is an important point.
The checks we make when we try and add a registrar/list to org-id do not include a searchable online list. My understanding is that if we can be certain that an organisation has a unique, persistent, stable ID then that is sufficient.
Where there is a searchable list then, for various reasons, it is easier to establish that IDs on the list are unique, persistent and stable.
If you have examples where registrars have been excluded from org-id because there is no searchable list then I think we should take another look at them.
It was almost certainly in the context of creating new XI-IATI, so you’d probably find them in older Discuss posts seeking non-objection to new XI-IATI.