The OECD now provides the Creditor Reporting System (CRS) 2018 and final 2019 data available in XML format, by donor and by recipient. Data cover all donors that report to the CRS including non-DAC countries and multilateral agencies. In addition, separate files are provided for each donor and each recipient, in order to facilitate the data processing.
These official data on development finance can be downloaded in four different formats: Excel, TXT/CSV, PC-axis, and XML. Different formats (such as software development, research, etc.) serve the diverse needs of numerous audiences; therefore, a variety of formats ensures that the data can be used widely and for a multitude of purposes.
This is an important step in making information about development finance easier to extract, locate, and compare. The DAC's CRS is the only international standard able to produce robust activity-level data and reliable statistics on total development finance flows (ODA, OOF, ODF, etc.). The objective of converting CRS data is to ensure that this information has greater visibility and usability.
We are also providing the DAC codelist in XML format (updated on 29/08/2023) in version 2.02 of the IATI Standard.
XML format is the computer-readable “mark-up” language used by programmers to extract and present data in a comparable and accessible way. Data will now also be comparable to the standard process put in place by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), with whom the OECD has worked closely together in this exercise.
What do you need to know?
The CRS-IATI XML files have been compressed and loaded on the FTP site https://webfs.oecd.org/crs-iati-xml/
We have been advised by the IATI Technical Advisory Group on presentation/format of reporting and participating organisations (see code format below). Complete CRS transaction history is not presented as this is technically difficult to retrieve from our database and link the associated transactions. Therefore, each XML record is a separate CRS transaction. In order to reduce the CRS-IATI files size and in accordance with IATI standard 2.01, some of the standard column labels have been omitted (recipient name, etc.).
For more information please contact us at [email protected].
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