Jonas  Gerding

Jonas Gerding posted in Newbies Corner

Hi everyone,

I am a freelance journalist from Germany, working among others on topics for development for media outlets such das Deutsche Welle.

I want to use IATI data for my reporting but I am still having some difficulties sorting out a couple of things.

1) I would like to know If anyone could refer me to introductory material for using XML files. Downloading and working with the CSV files works well but I’d like to be able to use XML data as well.

2) Is it normal that some publishers such as the German Ministry for Cooperation and Development (BMZ) publish data for each country and not in a single file, which makes it tedious to work with. Also, the BMZ data is limited to the the iati-identifier, hierarchy, default-currency, transaction-value, transaction-type, transation-date_iso-date, transaction-value_value-date (what’s the difference to the former?) – at least that’s what the CSV data provides, which shouldn’t differ from XML, right?

3) I would love to investigate how aid spending was re-orientated in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Does anyone has an idea if IATI data might be of help? This would be great.

I looking forward to exchanging on this and other topics with you. Enjoy your weekend!

Best wishes
Jonas

Amy Silcock
Amy Silcock

Hi Jonas,

Great to meet you and see your questions! Exciting that you are wanting to get to know IATI data, we are here to help.

1) For working directly with XML do you have any programming knowledge, such as Python or R? We tend to use these two languages for working directly with the XML. There are some online courses which can help get you using the languages which can point to if relevant, but they are a learning curve.

If not, then I would recommend using the CSV outputs from a variety of the IATI data tools.

2) Yes, for the larger publishers splitting files by country is normal (even if not recommended). Sometimes file size becomes an issue, hence files need to split into sub-sections. How tedious it is to use depends on how you are accessing the data. For example, using the IATI datastore ( https://iatidatastore.iatistandard.org/home ) allows you to query all their data in one go, but the IATI Registry ( https://www.iatiregistry.org/ ) will only allow you to download one file at a time. Please do share your queries and steps and we can help streamline an approach to getting the data you need!

For your question about what the CSV file for BMZ includes, where are you getting the CSV file from? There a few different ways and different tools contain different subsets of the xml data. This is partly due to what IATI fields were available when the tool was created, and partly due to the methodology of how to flatten a super nested XML structure into a flat CSV file. We can help direct to you to the most appropriate tool if we know more details.

3) Development Initiatives have been doing some work on tracking COVID-19 financing using IATI data. You can have a look at their work here: https://devinit.org/data/tracking-aid-flows-in-light-of-the-covid-19-cr…

There’s another visualisation (and downloadable data), using IATI data and some other sources here: https://covid19.humportal.org/

In IATI we also did some analysis last year: https://iatistandard.org/en/news/covid-19-data-published-to-iati-what-d…

Bill Anderson and Mark Brough may be able to share insights on their work!

Best, Amy

Jonas  Gerding
Jonas Gerding

Thanks a lot, Amy Silcock !
1) I have some basic Python knowledge but I am not sure if this is sufficient. I'll try and look for sources on working with Ptyhon on XML data - and let you know how it works. Otherwise I'll use the CSV files.
2) I thought about dowloading the data and exploring it via Excel or SQLite, at best in a single spreadsheet. Joining tables looks like an option here.
3) Thanks for the links, I only knew of Development Initiatives' project due to IATI's recent conference. They are somewhat unhappy with Germany's BMZ data as budgets are provided on project duration basis and not annualy. I guess that's also something Mark Brough might be able to discuss with me. I'll send you an email!

It's great to be part of this community! Glad to stay in touch with you.


Please log in or sign up to comment.