This proposal is part of the 2.03 upgrade process, please comment by replying below.
Standard
Activity
**Schema Object** iati-activity/participating-org/@role
**Type of Change** Deprecate code
**Issue** There is no commonly agreed definition of an “Accountable” organisation and the use of this classification is therefore confusing.
**Proposal** Deprecate value “2 - Accountable” from [OrganisationRole](https://iatiregistry.org/user/edit/wcuk_admin) codelist
**Standards Day** No information available
**Links** N/A
I agree with Herman and Mark that the description needs updated and we need to establish a common understanding.
The role description “An organisation responsible for oversight of the activity and its outcomes” does not mention anything about country institutions.
I think I would probably also be in favour of deprecation as long as we are sure that this is the case and don’t have to add this (or something similar) back in in future:
markbrough:I have seen that such information is captured in several systems but I wonder if others can speak to this – how useful is it, and how likely is it that data provided according to this definition would actually be any good?
Just want to flag that we had a similar discussion on this a few years ago.
The original intention for the definition of “Accountable” was the country institution with whom an aid agreement has been signed. For example:
This field was originally proposed in the context of enabling alignment with country budgets - see 2010 Steering Committee paper. There is some discussion on it in the 2012 Study on Reflecting Aid Flows in Country Budgets:
IATI Guidance from 2016 also points in the same direction.
If we follow this definition, there would be a limited number of projects that this is related to, and it would be particularly focused on projects funded by official donors. Following the finalisation of the methodology for aligning aid with country budgets, it is worth considering whether this field is still needed. However, even with that methodology, in the example above, the information that “Ministry of Finance signed the agreement” would only be visible if we retained the accountable organisation. I guess the question is: how valuable is that information?
In any case, I think this field could definitely do with a clearer definition than the one currently published on the IATI Standard website.