Discussion

Publishing Trust and/or Pooled Funds in IATI

Pelle Aardema
Pelle Aardema • 31 March 2017
1 comment

Hi everyone,

At the IATI TAG we had a constructive discussion about representing Trust Funds in IATI.

See below the model that I presented during the session, based on the principles in the Netherlands IATI publication guidelines (available here (English) and here (French).

 

Trust and pooled funds v01.png960×720 25.1 KB

 

In this case Organisation B is the organisation that manages the Trust Fund (Activity B). The Fund has 2 donors: Donor A and Donor D.
The Trust Fund supports multiple activities, managed through activities B1 and B2 and implemented by external partners - in this case Organisation C.

The IATI elements needed to represent this structure are added below.

 

Trust and pooled funds v01-2.png960×720 43.2 KB

 

During the TAG there seemed to be consensus about this model, but looking forward to hearing your thoughts now that you’ve been able to think about it a bit longer.

Pelle

Comments (1)

Mark Brough
Mark Brough • 7 years ago

Hi Pelle Aardema , thanks for starting this thread.

(TL;DR: maybe do this but add some way of a) explicitly saying "B is a Trust Fund" and b) making Trust Funded and non-Trust Funded activities not look super different from each other.)

I had a couple of thoughts on this - framed here as statements to make it easier to agree / disagree with – basically I think this is pretty good (though not 100% sure that trust funds should be activities rather than organisations), but maybe a couple of tweaks could make it a bit easier to use this data. Anyway, a few ideas…

  1. Starting point: Importance of being able to identify Trust Funds as distinct funding streams, and their relationship to donors and constituent projects
  2. A trust fund (in real life) is more like an activity than an organisation (I think this is true, but after a couple of conversations with others, I am not really sure on this point – are there any reasons why it would make sense and be more helpful to see it as an organisation rather than an activity?)
  3. It is important (we should be clear on why) to be able to say all of these things:
    • “we gave money to B trust fund, and not C trust fund”
    • “Activity B1 received money from B trust fund”
    • “Trust fund B received money from donors A and D”
    • "Activity B1 received money from trust fund B, which was in turn funded by donors A and D; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that donor A funded Activity B1"
    • “Activity B1 is funded from a trust fund, and not from a co-financing arrangement”
  4. One concern: Inconsistent structure for Trust Fund-funded activities compared to non-Trust Funded activity from the same organisation
    1. Let’s say the World Bank has two sets of projects: those funded by their own funds (i.e. IDA/IBRD) and those funded from Trust Funds.
    2. In the above example:
    • the IDA/IBRD projects would have a hierarchy of one level (as they do not have the Trust Fund activity) and the Trust Funded projects would have a hierarchy of two levels.
    • the actual projects (C1, C2) would appear at hierarchy=1 for IDA/IBRD projects and hierarchy=2 for Trust Funded projects (B1, B2)
    • this makes the IDA/IBRD and TF activities look fundamentally different sorts of things from each other as generally (at least for data published by donors), the hierarchy implies that an activity is (e.g.) a program vs a project, or a project vs a subcomponent. It also makes the data harder to use as there is an inconsistent structure for the same organisation.
  5. Suggestion: Thinking through how to capture trust fund data while still keeping things simple
    1. I think it would be useful to have some way of identifying the trust fund activity as actually a trust fund - it is not a “hierarchy 1” activity “above” Activity B1, but it is a different sort of thing. Would it better belong in the organisation file? I am not sure. But it feels like it would be helpful to be able at least to say explicitly, "B is a Trust Fund", as it looks a little different from normal activities.
    2. To avoid the structure looking very different (this feels like a bit of a hack, but a sort of elegant hack) you could create the Trust Fund activity B as a hierarchy=0 activity. This means it can still be a “parent” of activity B1 so that it can use the various features of the IATI Standard. However, trust-funded activities B1, B2 would then still sit at the same hierarchy=1 level as non-trust funded activities C1, C2.

Any thoughts?

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