This consultation closed on March 1st, 2019 and the discussions are no longer accepting comments. If you would like to contact IATI, please email [email protected] Many thanks to all those who took the time to comment on the discussions. Summaries of the discussions below will be available below on Friday 8th of March, 2019. We thank all our Moderators for facilitating the discussion and synthesising the outcomes. From the 4th to 18th of March, IATI will hold a survey on data use as the next phase of the consultation to develop the IATI Strategic Plan. To learn more about IATI, visit iatistandard.org. |
With IATI recently celebrating its ten-year anniversary, this online consultation is an opportunity to spark dialogue around essential priorities for the initiative’s next three years. Anticipating the next generation of partnership and data needs, your responses will help IATI to ensure it responds to the rapidly-evolving development finance, open data and transparency agendas, to increase the use of development cooperation data.
You may wish to read through two background documents prepared for this consultation (an external and internal scanning paper). These papers examine the current international cooperation and open data landscape, as well as IATI’s progress and achievements since its inception in 2008, and may be useful tools to inform your participation in the consultation.
Please feel free to comment in as many threads, and respond to as many or as few questions, as you like. Though the consultation will largely be hosted in English, comments in French and Spanish are also welcomed. You may also submit contributions to [email protected] to be posted on your behalf, should you encounter any connectivity issues.
1. Should IATI do more to engage with actors such as South-South Cooperation providers, climate financiers and the private sector? Are there other actors or processes that IATI should engage with, and if yes, what will it take to engage them?
2. How can IATI’s outreach be improved to contribute more to the ongoing discussions in the data for development space, including the open data for sustainable development movement? 3. Given the evolving international development landscape, where should IATI’s primary outreach focus be placed over the next 3-5 years? Are there specific regions, sectors or audiences that should be prioritised? How can they be reached / involved? |
Synthesis report of discussion: "Considering Strategic Partnerships in the Evolving International Development Landscape”
Remarkable quotes:
“IATI is meant for everyone, not just data nerds!”
“Stop telling what IATI is (or should be) and instead start showing what we do - In short: we are facing the need of new business model for IATI!”
“Let's get rid of constituents thinking in IATI and only think in terms of IATI as a community among equal partners.”
Questions:
1. Should IATI do more to engage with actors such as South-South Cooperation providers, climate financiers and the private sector? Are there other actors or processes that IATI should engage with, and if yes, what will it take to engage them?
In general, sustainable development outcomes are the most effective when all actors join forces. For IATI to be successful and inclusive of all actors, IATI should broaden the scope beyond aid (e.g. procurement and investments) without necessarily adopting the standard. Engaging with South-South Cooperation providers is not just strategic, but also coherent with IATI’s vision and mission. For engaging South-South Cooperation providers, it is key to monitor and influence the coming multilateral agreements that will result from the Buenos Aires Plan of Action.
The increasing volume of investments and activities calls for urgent coordination on transparency and accountability and makes more strategic partnerships with southern organizations critical. It is also recommended to strengthen partnerships with intermediaries who already have relationships with multiple actors in a sector. Therefore, strategic partnerships with Southern NGO umbrella groups could be considered. SDGs are a great entry point for private sector organizations and establishing IATI data as a ‘marketplace’ for development and humanitarian data (similar to any other market platform) would be valuable to monitor and assess the contributions they make in a certain country.
One of the most important strategic alliances is with the TOSSD agenda to avoid duplication of effort. The Addis Tax Initiative (ATI) is another actor that IATI is recommended to strategically engage with. Other initiatives that naturally lend themselves as partners to learn from are the Open Data or Open Government Partnerships as they share similar common objectives around open and transparent data for development.
a. If the scale of strategic partnerships broadens to incorporate emerging development actors, how will this impact IATI’s governance structure? What institutional changes should be considered to ensure that IATI is inclusive, responsive, and fit-for-purpose?
The inclusion of new publishers should not necessarily be considered strategic partnerships. Any actor that wishes to publish their activities in support of SDGs should be welcome to use the IATI-standard, without any need to change governance structure nor business model. The priority should be to deliver on core business, instead of spending resources on chasing new types of publishers. If there is demand for the data, it is assumed that they will gravitate towards IATI.
It is possible that the need to add South-South providers to the governance structure emerges. Different groups have different needs and requirements for the standard, hence there may be the need to establish working groups to address some specific needs for DFI's, private sector partners, or others. There should also be a concerted (governance) effort to ensure that new members do not only join to “check a box”, but are determined to provide useful, usable information. A general consideration for IATI should be to “get the IATI house in order” (to be fit-for-purpose) before expanding the stakeholder map.
b. The scale of strategic partnerships would also impact IATI’s current business model (membership fee-based). What considerations and measures will be needed to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of IATI?
IATI should continue a membership-fee based structure and the membership incentives should be curated around support, validation, and user support. Innovation, creativity and ongoing commitment to different partners should be part of the formula to increase the value of membership.
c. How can we persuade publishers to become members?
At the 2018 Members’ Assembly, members overwhelmingly voiced that raising awareness and improving data quality are critical to increasing membership. Additionally, IATI should target South-South Cooperation providers for membership and work with other initiatives (e.g. the Grand Bargain example) to ensure commitment to and use of IATI data.
2. How can IATI’s outreach be improved to contribute more to the ongoing discussions in the data for development space, including the open data for sustainable development movement?
IATI should increase its presence in a variety of spaces. Given the increased emphasis on data use in the open data for sustainable development movement, it would be beneficial for IATI’s outreach to focus more on applying data to strategic problems and sharing stakeholders’ experiences working with IATI data. Some outreach activities should entail convening donors and recipients to discuss specific examples when they have used IATI data in decision-making and how IATI data benefits them. Outreach should also be considered outside of the data space, as IATI is meant for everyone not just “data nerds”. Demonstrating approaches and purposes of using IATI to a variety of different stakeholder groups should be considered for promotional matters.
To increase outreach and representation in a variety of fora, IATI members and other parts of the community should be engaged/supported, potentially with funding from IATI and logistical support from the IATI secretariat. Other members could investigate in how to engage more broadly with networks outside of the IATI community. In general, it should be considered how IATI benefits can be demonstrated, rather than explaining what IATI is to different audiences.
3. Given the evolving international development landscape, where should IATI’s primary outreach focus be placed over the next 3-5 years? Are there specific regions, sectors or audiences that should be prioritised? How can they be reached / involved?
Generally, the focus of outreach should be on expanding data use, not in the sense of data publishing, but using the information provided through IATI for coordination, learning, improving effectiveness, and/or accountability. An area that bears tremendous potential but is currently not used at all is gender. By making the policy markers searchable, IATI became one of the first places for looking at the marker of gender projects, which is pretty ground-breaking. The community could build on this and try to work with gender experts around the world to create standardized gender indicators that could be included in IATI.
The improvement of d-portal is a priority agreed at the last Members’ Assembly Meeting and is the way to demonstrate IATI commitment to use of data. Without a well-functioning d-portal there is no increase in data use and there is no point in expanding the coverage of IATI activity beyond ODA even if this could be relevant in the context of the 2030 Agenda.
Capacity development and training on IATI data use and publishing should be fundamental in the IATI Strategic Plan. What is IATI and why it is important, how to use IATI and how IATI contributes to data for development as well as to the open data movement are essential contents for a capacity development program. IATI brings coherence to aid management, however many partner countries don’t use it for its intended purposes. To this end, raising awareness on how IATI standard can be helpful in managing the aid flows would be valuable and increase the uptake. Strong communications and outreach efforts to broader audience would be useful as well.
More collaboration around technical challenges. If IATI is unable to address fundamental issues such as how organization identifiers are used, then it will be difficult to use different but complementary datasets in a meaningful way.