CRS User's Guide: What purposes does aid serve? Guidance for analyses of aid by sector

The term “purpose of aid” signifies the sector of the recipient’s economy that the aid activity is designed to assist, e.g. health, energy, agriculture.  It does not refer to the type of goods or services provided.  Some contributions are not targeted to a specific sector, e.g. balance-of-payments support, debt relief, emergency aid.  These are called “non sector allocable aid”.

The Aid Activity database registers information on the purpose of aid using a sector classification specifically developed to track aid flows and to permit measuring the share of each sector or other purpose category in total aid. All in all, there are 26 main sector/purpose categories, each of which is defined through a number of “purpose codes”.

Each activity can be assigned only one purpose code.  (This is to avoid double-counting when summing up activities in different ways.)  For activities cutting across several sectors, either a multi-sector code or the code corresponding to the largest component of the activity is used.

In IDS/o, users can search data by purpose code or sector and obtain results either at the level of individual activities or in the form of summary statistics by sector and recipient.

More:

• About single sector codes