Coverage statistics are designed to assess what proportion of an organisation’s total operational spend is published to IATI.
Previously, the IATI technical team followed a manual process of contacting IATI publishers and requesting total operational spend values via email. Results were stored in a public Google sheet. Data was collected for the years 2014 and 2015 and the values were used to calculate a coverage-adjusted score in the Summary Statistics page. As this was a very time consuming exercise (compounded by the increase in the number of publishers) coverage data collection has not been done since 2016, resulting in the coverage-adjusted scores in the summary statistics being out of date for the majority of publishers. As a result, in September 2018 the technical team took the decision to remove the coverage-adjusted values from the Dashboard.
We recognise the importance of coverage and presenting how much of an organisation’s total spend is published to IATI. However, collecting coverage data manually, as previously done, is not a sustainable model.
In future, we plan to use an automated system that will calculate the coverage statistic for an organisation by using its IATI organisation file. We are exploring a methodology that uses the <total-expenditure> element in a publisher’s organisation file, and compares this to the total spend for a given year in their activity files. Completing this work requires an update to the dashboard methodology. This is in our job queue but we don’t have an estimated time for completing the work. Please look out for updates via IATI Discuss and our website.
In the meantime, we strongly recommend that all IATI publishers include <total-expenditure> in their organisation file.