IATI+AidHedge integration ready!
For quite some time we have been wanting to connect our online services directly with data from IATI. Through the International Aid Transparency Initiative, donors and aid organisations publish data about aid activities and funding. There are about 700 000 reported activities, going back to the 1960s.
Attention, this is an old article where certain parts may not be completely up to date. Aidhedge is a young company where things quickly change. We have chosen to retain the article as a “lessons learned”.
Hooking up IATI to our services means a big leap in scale for AidHedge, as we can now help thousands of aid organisations understand how their financial transactions affect funding, in past and present activities. Directly — with no additional data input.
We are planning to develop the connection to IATI further in future versions of our online service, where we will be working with partners to add lots of new features, tools and services to the platform.
Using the new connection we pick data about funding and financial transactions from IATI and integrate it into AidHedge. As a result you can create reports on financial transactions and exchange risks, for thousands of activities, and it’s all done automatically by the system.
For each project, our algorithms look at how funding has been affected by fluctuating exchange rates, and for ongoing activities we also calculate and visualize risks.
Here is an example activity picked from IATI, in Tanzania, funded by Sida.
Here are another few examples, showing the integration at work with different donors, different partner organisations and different countries:
- Emergency Response Funds (ERF), 2015–2016, OCHA. Budget in EUR, with exchange fluctuations affecting the local value of disbursed funds in four countries (ended activity).
- Buj family and health services, Burundi, 2016–2022, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Funding in EUR, costs in BIF. Illustrates growing uncertainty due to exchange rate volatility (ongoing project).
If you would like to try this out, just sign in (or sign up!) and paste an IATI identifier into our service. The system takes care of the rest. A searchable list of all IATI activities can be found here at d-portal.org.
The current version of our IATI integration covers IATI v 2.0 and above. There is still a fairly large number of organisations reporting in earlier versions, but the differences were just too big for us to include support for all versions at this stage. We will be looking at how we can support all versions of IATI later on.
As always, we hope that when you have tried this feature you will also give us your input on what we can improve and what you are missing. We move forward largely by being exposed to all your great questions! So check out the service, try out your IATI projects and let us know how it works — send Númi an email, or reach out to us on Twitter.
It should also be noted that the reports we can produce right now in many cases depend on a number of assumptions. Our analysis of financial transactions and currency risks/outcomes is based on data about involved currencies, exchange rates and transaction and commitment dates.
Many IATI activities lack some of this data. To enable a basic use of the service we make some assumptions where data is missing, like basing currencies on donor and recipient countries. So please treat the reports accordingly.
We will write a more technical post going through all these details!
In the meantime, please try out the current service, and keep in mind that the toolkit is still a early beta version. So we really need feedback and comments. Send Númi an email, or reach out to us on Twitter!
