Humanitarian Reporting

Please also see the Humanitarian Reporting Guidelines which are currently out for community review on the IATI Community Discuss Forum

Definition

Within the IATI activity standard there are a number of elements and vocabularies that enable humanitarian specific information to be published.

  • humanitarian-scope defines the emergency or event that a specific activity is in response to.

The humanitarian-scope element uses the following vocabularies:

  • HumanitarianScopeType codelist is used to describe types of humanitarian events.

  • HumanitarianScopeVocabulary is used to define the public list(s) on which an emergency is referenced.

Humanitarian related information is also on:

  • SectorVocabulary – code "10": The Humanitarian Global Clusters (Inter-Agency Standing Committee) defines the global clusters to which a a specific activity relates.

The following also enables any activity or transaction that is humanitarian related to be identified:

  • The iati-activity/@humanitarian – indicates that the relevant iati-activity is humanitarian-related.

  • transaction/@humanitarian – indicates that a specific transaction is humanitarian-related.

Timely Reporting

In the event of any rapid onset or other emergency it is recommended that publishers refresh and re-publish humanitarian activities on a daily or at least weekly basis in order that the most up to date information is continually available to data users. Such data users include, but are not limited to, UN OCHA FTS who are able to automatically import IATI files that contain humanitarian elements into the OCHA FTS systems. This therefore may require a change to a publishers own verification and / or publishing processes in order to enable this to happen as data may not be subject to ‘normal’ verification processes in order to allow this to happen.

Considerations

When using the IATI activity standard to declare humanitarian related activities the following should be considered:

  • It is the data owner who decides if an activity should include humanitarian elements.

  • It is recommended that at least the humanitarian-scope element and iati-activity/@humanitarian attribute should be used for each humanitarian related activity.

  • If the emergency is included on more than one on of the lists defined on HumanitarianScopeVocabulary then all references should be declared via multiple humanitarian-scope elements.

  • The title of an emergency can be repeated in different languages via the use of the <narrative> field of the humanitarian-scope element.

  • If an emergency is not defined on any of the lists included on HumanitarianScopeVocabulary then a publisher can declare their own values using code ‘99’. It is recommended that the title of an emergency is constructed using the format ‘location of event + type of event + month of event + year of event’ eg ‘Nepal Earthquake April 2015’.

  • When an activity relates to multiple clusters the sector element should be repeated and a @percentage attribute must be used. The total of all specified percentages must add up to 100.

  • When an activity relates to multiple humanitarian policies the policy-marker element should be repeated.

  • When defining a humanitarian policy-marker element, the policy-marker/@significance attribute is not required.