OECD DAC codelist updates- February 2021

That is i.m.o. a good suggestion Petya. Changing the name of an IATI data element would be a breaking change and could only be done in a major (integer) upgrade. Don't know if that is worth the trouble.

This is definitely also work in progress for us. We intend to solve it by some refinements to our strict hierarchy (channel-codes, organisations, creditor-data), allowing some 'virtual' organisations in our system, that allows payments to one creditor to count as flows trough different channels. I am e.g. defining an 'organisation' called 'OCHA-led country-based pool funds', allowing these flows to count against Channel 41401, while still using the same creditor-data (i.e. transferring funds to the very same bank-account) as our contributions to OCHA, reported against channel 41127.

Perhaps we could find ways to address common issues like this at the WS 10-11. March?

Hi David, could you please elaborate a bit? I do not see immediately what the problem is. If you are doing a healthcare response specifically targeted at COVID-19, I would say the activity is 100% 12264 "COVID-19". If it is only 50% targeting COVID and 50% other basic healthcare, then your example is i.m.o. a correct representation of the facts.

I would be reluctant to add these kind of details on the transaction-level even if it was possible in the IATI standard. It will introduce quite a lot of additional complexity and administrative burden, assuming that you can exactly pinpoint on the transaction level for which purpose the funds are to be spend (which I doubt in many cases).

For what it is worth, I have always found it problematic to mix and match what the code lists are for.  Here is seems OECD is mixing the type of services (traditional DAC codes) with an event such as COVID or a typhoon or act of war that necessitates the service.  It is similar to the challenge I find with trying to classify the humanitarian projects as emergency or appeal.  Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.  We lose the multi-dimensional aspect of these things when lists try to mix apples and oranges. 

Herman van Loon - Thanks for the reply. The problem is that COVID-19 isn't really a sector, it's a theme that's orthogonal to the main OECD sector types.

So if a reporting org has an activity that's targeting nutrition and teacher support in schools affected by COVID-19, how do they split it up? 33⅓% COVID-19, 33⅓% nutrition, and 33⅓% education? Michelle Levesque describes the problem well from an IM perspective.

Yes, either policy-marker or simply tag would do the trick for non-sectoral themes like COVID-19, Global Famine Relief, Gender, Mental Health, etc. Unfortunately, we don't allow either element inside transaction, so it's hard to be granular enough with them, especially for reporting orgs who publish giant omnibus activities with dozens or hundreds of transactions.

COVID is not the first example: malaria (12262) and tuberculosis (12263), HIV/AIDS (13040)  are also singled out from the infectious disease control sector (12250). So the problem mentioned by Michelle and David is not new. It seems that the OECD/DAC is repeating its approach for other infectious diseases. It remains to be seen btw if COVID will be a single event or (unfortunately) is going to stay like the examples above. 

Herman van Loon Thanks again for the reply, Herman van Loon — the challenge, again, as Theo and Michelle have mentioned, is that the 2020 Global Humanitarian Response Plan and others have used COVID-19 primarily as a policy marker more than a specific health response. C19-related aid activities can include income support, nutrition, education, etc. etc. as well as healthcare. I suspect most of the C19-related activities over the next couple of years will be outside the healthcare sector.

Which would suggest that we lobby for adding a new policy marker to the OECD/DAC? The OECD/DAC is very reluctant though to add new policy markers. They recently have adopted an 'hashtag' approach, where you can define the #COVID hashtag for any activity (comparable to using the IATI tag element). The disadvantage of this approach is that an activity can only be marked as 100% or 0% COVID relevant. It is also not on the transaction level (as non of the OECD/DAC data is). Using a policy marker would have the advantage to distinguish between 'principal' (the activity would not have existed if it did not score on COVID) or 'significant'  (the activity would have existed even if it did not score on COVID).