Atlas of Aid

ENITFRDEESPT

How it works

Automatic translation.

Every night a set of programmes checks the sources, downloads new data and rebuilds the profiles. Here are the steps, briefly.

  1. Source checking. For each source we verify whether a new version is available (registers every week, tax returns and Wikidata every month). Only what has changed is downloaded.
  2. Recognising organisations. The same NGO appears in several sources: we recognise it by its registration numbers (for example the Charity Commission number, the Italian tax code, the US EIN, the IATI identifier). Some sources, such as funding from the European Union, OCHA and government donors, often do not report registration numbers: in those cases we use the name, only when it matches a single organisation in the atlas, and we manually exclude ambiguous names. Each organisation is assigned a stable code, which stays the same even if its name or registration number changes.
  3. Families. We link national entities to their family (for example Oxfam Italia, Oxfam Novib and Oxfam GB to the Oxfam family) and report, where it exists, the consolidated financial statement published by the family.
  4. Quality checks. Automatic rules look for impossible or inconsistent values (for example expenditure a thousand times smaller than the income of the same year). Those values are not shown and the profile flags it.
  5. Sectors and translations. We map the sector codes of the different sources to twelve common macro-sectors and automatically translate the descriptions and text pages into the six languages of the site.
  6. Manually curated parts. Families, inclusions and exclusions from the scope, thematic pages (for example sea rescue) and budgets taken from annual reports are checked by hand, each with its own source; the nightly pipeline applies them together with the automatic data.
  7. Publication. The site is regenerated and published. Every figure carries its source, year and original currency.

Details on methodological choices are on the Methodology page; data limitations are on the Data limitations page.