Limits of the data

Automatic translation.

What Atlas of Aid data does not say, or only says in part.

• Uneven coverage. The most complete data concerns the countries with detailed public registers that we use: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy and, in part, Sweden. For other countries we mainly know the organisations that publish on IATI or are registered in the European Union Transparency Register.
• IATI is partial. It contains the projects that organisations choose to publish, not their overall activity.
• Self-reported data. The data from Open Cooperazione, the European Union Transparency Register and annual reports are provided by the organisations themselves and are not verified by an authority; the profile indicates when a budget is self-reported.
• Public funds from different sources. Funding from the European Union, OCHA and government donors partly overlaps and should not be added together. Donor payments are incomplete (not all of them indicate the recipient), and the most recent ones arrive late.
• Delays. Budgets arrive one or two years late; the most recent year may be missing.
• Different financial years. Organisations close their accounts on different dates (31 December, 30 June, 31 March…): comparisons use "the latest available financial year".
• Federations. The consolidated accounts of families of organisations are not all certified and sometimes exclude some members: we indicate this case by case.
• Currency conversions. Rankings in dollars depend on the average exchange rate for the year and may change the relative position of organisations from different countries.
• Staff. Depending on the source, it indicates employees, full-time equivalents or even local staff and contractors: not always comparable.
• Estimated sectors. The main sector is reconstructed from different classifications and, in the absence of codes, from keywords: it is an indication, not an official classification.
• No quality judgement. The figures measure size and presence, not effectiveness or impact.