Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

commitment is a firm written obligation by a government or official agency, backed by the appropriation or availability of the necessary funds, to provide resources of a specified amount under specified financial terms and conditions and for specified purposes for the benefit of a recipient country or a multilateral agency. Members unable to comply with this definition should explain the definition that they use. -- Commitments are considered to be made at the date a loan or grant agreement is signed or the obligation is otherwise made known to the recipient (e.g. in the case of budgetary allocations to overseas territories, the final vote of the budget should be taken as the date of commitment). For certain special expenditures, e.g. emergency aid, the date of disbursement may be taken as the date of commitment. -- Bilateral commitments comprise new commitments and additions to earlier commitments, excluding any commitments cancelled during the same year. Cancellations and reductions in the year reported on of commitments made in earlier years are reported in the CRS, but not in the DAC questionnaire. -- In contrast to bilateral commitments, commitments of capital subscriptions, grants and loans to multilateral agencies should show the sum of amounts which are expected to be disbursed before the end of the next year and amounts disbursed in the year reported on but not previously reported as a commitment. For capital subscriptions in the form of notes payable at sight, enter the expected amount of deposits of such notes as the amount committed.

Destination of Official Development Assistance Disbursements. Geographical breakdown by donor, recipient and for some types of aid (e.g. grant, loan, technical co-operation) on a disbursement basis (i.e. actual expenditures). The data cover flows from bilateral and multilateral donors which focus on flows from DAC member countries and the EU Institutions.

This dataset contains bilateral commitment data on aid in support of environment sustainability and aid to biodiversity, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and desertification from the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database. In their reporting to the DAC CRS, donors are requested to indicate for each activity whether or not it targets environment and the Rio Conventions (biodiversity, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and desertification). A scoring system of three values is used, in which aid activities are "marked" as targeting environment as the "principal objective" or a "significant objective", or as not targeting the objective. The environment marker identifies activities that are "intended to produce an improvement in the physical and/or biological environment of the recipient country, area or target group concerned" or "include specific action to integrate environmental concerns with a range of development objectives through institution building and/or capacity development". A large majority of activities targeting the objectives of the Rio Conventions fall under the DAC definition of "aid to environment". The Rio markers permit their specific identification.

This dataset contains commitment data (since 2002) and disbursement data (since 2009) on aid in support of gender equality from the CRS database. In their reporting to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Creditor Reporting System (CRS), donors are requested to indicate for each activity whether or not it targets gender equality as one of its policy objectives. To qualify as “gender equality focussed,” an activity must explicitly promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. An activity can either target gender equality as its “principal objective” or as a “significant objective”. A “principal” score (2) is assigned if gender equality was an explicit objective of the activity and fundamental to its design - i.e. the activity would not have been undertaken without this objective. A “significant” score (1) is assigned if gender equality was an important, but secondary, objective of the activity - i.e. it was not the principal reason for undertaking the activity. A “not targeted” score (0) is assigned if, after being screened against the gender equality policy marker, an activity is not found to target gender equality. Activities assigned a “principal objective” score should not be considered better than activities assigned a “significant objective” score, as donors that mainstream gender equality - and thus integrate it into their projects across a range of sectors - are more likely to allocate the marker score “significant” to their aid activities. The gender equality marker allows an approximate quantification of aid flows that target gender equality as a policy objective. In marker data presentations the figures for principal and significant objectives should be shown separately and the sum referred to as the “estimate” or “upper bound” of gender equality-focussed aid. An activity can have more than one principal or significant objective. Therefore, total amounts targeting the different objectives should not be added-up to avoid double-counting. Policy markers seek information on the donor’s policy objectives which can be best assessed at the design stage of projects. This is why policy markers are applied to commitments. Policy marker data on a disbursement basis can also be compiled, but it is important to note that this does not mean the policy objectives of projects under implementation would have been re-assessed. Rather, the disbursements are linked to the qualitative information on the original commitment through project identifiers. Consequently, a project marked as gender equality focussed at the commitment stage will be flagged as gender equality focussed throughout its lifetime, unless the qualitative information was changed. Activity-level gender equality marker data that underlie the aggregate figures presented in this dataset are available for consultation and download: see “Export”, “Related files”.

Note: CPA data for 2018 and 2019 are projections from the 2016 Survey on Forward Spending Plans. Country Programmable Aid (CPA), outlined in our Development Brief  and also known as “core” aid, is the portion of aid donors programme for individual countries, and over which partner countries could have a significant say. CPA is much closer than ODA to capturing the flows of aid that goes to the partner country, and has been proven in several studies to be a good proxy of aid recorded at country level. CPA was developed in 2007 in close collaboration with DAC members. It is derived on the basis of DAC statistics and was retroactively calculated from 2000 onwards

The objective of the CRS Aid Activity database is to provide a set of readily available basic data that enables analysis on where aid goes, what purposes it serves and what policies it aims to implement, on a comparable basis for all DAC members. Data are collected on individual projects and programmes. Focus is on financial data but some descriptive information is also made available.

Bilateral ODA commitments by purpose. Data cover the years 2005 to 2009. Amounts are expressed in USD million. The sectoral distribution of bilateral ODA commitments refers to the economic sector of destination (i.e. the specific area of the recipient's economic or social structure whose development is, or is intended to be fostered by the aid), rather than to the type of goods or services provided. These are aggregates of individual projects notified under the Creditor Reporting System, supplemented by reporting on the sectoral distribution of technical co-operation, and on actual disbursements of food and emergency aid.

This dataset presents members' total use of the multilateral system i.e. both their multilateral aid ("Core contributions to") and bilateral aid channelled through ("Contributions through") multilateral organisations. These data originate from members' reporting at item-level in the CRS and are published here starting with 2011 data (item-level data for multilateral aid is not complete in CRS for earlier years).

Other official flows are official sector transactions which do not meet the ODA criteria, e.g.:  i.) Grants to developing countries for representational or essentially commercial purposes;  ii.) Official bilateral transactions intended to promote development but having a grant element of less than 25 per cent;  iii.) Official bilateral transactions, whatever their grant element, that are primarily export-facilitating in purpose. This category includes by definition export credits extended directly to an aid recipient by an official agency or institution ("official direct export credits");  iv.) The net acquisition by governments and central monetary institutions of securities issued by multilateral development banks at market terms;  v.) Subsidies (grants) to the private sector to soften its credits to developing countries [see Annex 3, paragraph A3.5.iv)b)];  vi.) Funds in support of private investment.

Private transactions are those undertaken by firms and individuals resident in the reporting country.

Official Development Financing (ODF), measured for recipient countries only, is defined as the sum of their receipts of bilateral ODA, concessional and non-concessional resources from multilateral sources, and bilateral other official flows made available for reasons unrelated to trade, in particular loans to refinance debt.

Total Official Flows: the sum of Official Development Assistance (ODA) and Other Official Flows (OOF) represents the total (gross or net) disbursements by the official sector at large to the recipient country shown.

Total Receipts, Net: in addition to Official Development Assistance, this heading includes in particular: other official bilateral transactions which are not concessional or which, even though they have concessional elements, are primarily trade facilitating in character (i.e., "Other Official Flows''); changes in bilateral long-term assets of the private non-monetary and monetary sectors, in particular guaranteed export credits, private direct investment, portfolio investment and, to the extent they are not covered in the preceding headings, loans by private banks. Flows from the multilateral sector which are not classified as concessional are also included here.