Aligning aid with
partner country budgets
Progress update, March 2014
What is the budget identifier?
• Two required elements, as approved in 2012:
– Common code, or “Spine”
• “Rosetta Stone” helping match donors’ sector
codes against partner country budget codes
• Individual mapping required between Spine and
each country budget classification
– Economic classification
• capital v recurrent expenditures
• Aiming for automatic exchange of data: IATI
data → (aid management systems →) budget
Mapping from donors, to the Spine, to the budget
http://publishwhatyoufund.org/testarea/tz/mapping/donor-spine-vote.html
Example 1: mapping to a country budget
• Project information from donor system:
– Title: English Language Teaching Training
– Description: To support the improvement of the
quality of education in primary schools in Tanzania and
to increase the number of children, particularly girls,
able to transfer to secondary education by improved
teaching of early grade reading and numeracy. This will
benefit 230,000 children by 2017.
– CRS Sectors:
11220: Primary
education (50%)
11130: Teacher
training (30%)
11110: Education policy and
administrative management (20%)
– Economic classification:
Recurrent (100%)
– Spine codes in IATI file:
5.5.5: Social Affairs –
Education - Primary (50%)
5.3.11: Social Affairs – Education
– Teacher training (30%)
5.3.1: Social Affairs - Education –
Administration, policy and planning (20%)
Example 1: importing data into a country system
Example 2: project mapped to a country budget
• Project information:
– Title: Accelerating Efforts to Improve Maternal and
Child Health in Simiyu region
– Description: Improve health services for mothers,
newborn babies and young children by strengthening
existing health systems, refurbishing health centres
and district hospitals, providing training for local
government officials and health workers and
supporting community engagement activities.
– CRS Sectors:
12220: Basic health
care (20%)
13030: Family planning (20%)
– Economic classification:
Capital (50%)
Recurrent (50%)
– Spine codes in IATI file:
5.1.1: Social Affairs – Health – Policy, planning
and administration (100%)
13020: Reproductive health care (20%)
12250: Infectious
disease control (20%)
13040: STD control
including HIV/AIDS (20%)
Example 2: importing data into a country system
Conclusions on the Spine
• Current CRS codes work for 70% of projects
– Using 2 CRS codes (rather than “Multisector”)
brings this to 83%
• Sub-codes needed for remaining 30%
– 20 Spine codes are more detailed than CRS
• The Spine does not require changes to
donors’ systems if already using CRS codes
– However, more precise sector codes (including
the new sub-codes) would yield better results
Conclusions on the economic classification
• Need guidance to ensure consistent
classification of capital expenditure
– What constitutes capital expenditure from the
perspective of the partner country, not the
relevant Ministry of Finance/Treasury in the
donor country.
• Not possible to generate economic
classification from existing published data
• Probably need to collect data at source (ie
in project documents)
– Changes to donor systems may be needed to
capture capital expenditure
Next steps
• Consultations on Spine and capital
expenditure
• Finalizing Spine and guidance
• Timelines
• Country-level case studies of integration
– technical issues
– process issues
Mapping Donors’ CRS Sectors against the Common
Code
http://publishwhatyoufund.org/testarea/tz/mapping/donors-category.html
http://publishwhatyoufund.org/testarea/tz/mapping/donors-sector.html