18.
Switzerland – Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
Fair
OVERVIEW
Switzerland should be congratulated for beginning publication to the IATI Standard in November 2013. In May 2014, it also updated its implementation schedule to include moderately ambitious plans for IATI implementation. As per the schedule, SDC plans to publish 50% of the assessed IATI fields by the end of 2015. However, this does not include added-value fields such as project documents and performance data. In June 2014, a transparency statement was posted on SDC’s website which details its international commitments on aid transparency, including on implementing IATI. Information on current projects approved since May 2012 and with budgets over CHF 0.5 million can be found on a new projects database. It is envisioned that this database will streamline information from SDC’s country offices with information held by its headquarters. The government also launched an open data portal – opendata.admin.ch – in September 2013 but it is yet to include information on Swiss development cooperation spending. Switzerland has not joined OGP.
ANALYSIS
Switzerland scores 53.8%, a 36 percentage point increase on its score in 2013, making it the biggest improver in 2014. This increase is owed to the publication of information on current aid activities to IATI. Its IATI publication includes 20 information items at the organisation and activity level. It ranks sixth out of 50 bilateral organisations and is placed in the fair category. It performs best on basic activity and classifications information, scoring over 90% and 80% respectively for these sub-groups. It lags behind on the provision of links to activity documents as these are not provided in its IATI activity files. Of the 22 indicators that take format into account, 17 are published in machine-readable formats. However, its IATI publication is still missing some important fields such as recipient country budgets, country strategy papers, forward-looking activity budgets, objectives, results and evaluations. It also does not publish results, sub-national location information or impact appraisals consistently for all its projects. Overall, it scores on 30 of the 39 indicators.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- Switzerland should work to improve its publication to IATI so it is comprehensive and uses all fields, including forward-looking budgets, sub-national location data, links to project documents and results data. It should publish a more complete organisation file, including organisation planning documents.
- It should update its implementation schedule so it is ambitious and includes specific timelines and delivery targets, aiming towards full publication of the IATI Standard by the end of 2015.
- Switzerland should join OGP. This would be an opportunity to share best practice in open data and open government approaches.
DONOR PROFILE
First published to IATI:
Nov-13
2013 ATI Score:
18.08%
2013 ATI Rank:
44