This is a long term project, with the first real users submitting their reports on the system in late 2020
We’ve been working with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to help them track spending on overseas aid, or Overseas Development Assistance
It’s important to track the UK Government’s aid spending, or Official Development Assistance (ODA). Who’s spending the money? What projects and programmes are being delivered? What rate is the money being spent at? These questions are essential for the organisations that manage ODA, and for people who care about transparency in this area.
DSIT is one of the government departments responsible for allocating and tracking ODA spending. They do this by working with delivery partners like the UK Space Agency, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Royal Society.
This has been a challenging process for delivery partners and government, so we worked with DSIT to create and support a digital service that makes this easier, more transparent and improves data quality.
Outcome
Working with DSIT we created Report ODA (RODA), a new digital service which makes it much easier to gather information and track the projects and programmes being delivered. This is a long term project, with the first real users submitting their reports on the system in late 2020. We have continued to develop and make iterative improvements to the service since then.
Information is published to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) data standard which aims to improve consistency in the way data on aid spending is published around the world. As more organisations adopt the standard, it becomes easier for people to use the data and take a global view.
People in the UK and around the world who need to track aid spending will be able to build on the foundations we have laid when developing their own services.
What we did
Traditionally, tracking ODA had been a slow and painful process with delivery partners having to fill out a fairly complicated spreadsheet every quarter and submit it by email. It wasn’t straightforward to automatically validate what a user had entered, and a meticulous review process was needed to prevent data quality issues creeping in.
The Department also communicated with delivery partners via email to resolve any queries or issues, and people were able to create copies of original spreadsheets, making it harder to establish a single version of the truth.
The RODA service replaced this spreadsheet reporting tool with a digital service that irons out data quality issues like missing fields or invalid dates, and reduces the effort needed to review and approve these reports.
Working with data standards
Because so many people around the world have an interest in aid spending data, a data standard has been created to help improve consistency.
Conforming to the IATI standard was one of the most challenging parts of this project. Creating data standards is about forging consensus over time, and that can be a tough and messy process. Publishing against a data standard isn’t always easy either. It can take a lot of effort to align what you already do against a common standard, and it’s likely to result in some compromises.
At dxw, we strongly believe this is an investment worth making. It makes it much easier for people and organisations to get value from your data. Anyone working with the IATI standard will immediately understand the ODA data, and that makes it far more likely that people will use it to create interesting and useful things.
Iterating the service
We have continued to support RODA and make iterative improvements in response to user needs and changing requirements.
Following several rounds of quarterly reporting in public beta, for example, the core support team had gathered feedback from users about their experience. We shipped a variety of improvements to the service in response:
- tagging, so fund managers can quickly pull out tranches of data in themes
- a way of clearly showing historical revisions to budgets in the interface
- more informative statuses for reporting quality assurance
- an improved view of historical reports
- more consistency between bulk uploads, with more helpful support messaging in the interface
We’ve improved functionality, removed Funds and added new ones, including those that have both ODA and non-ODA funding. The latter meant developing a set of new journeys for creating and reporting activities.
Further changes and improvements are on the way.