Context for working with the OECD DAC2A table, ODA disbursements by donor and recipient country or region.

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What it is

DAC2A reports ODA disbursements from each donor to each recipient country, region, and income group. It holds gross ODA, net ODA, and their components (grants, loans, debt relief, technical co-operation, humanitarian aid, and others). All values are disbursements in USD at current and constant prices.

Donors include DAC countries, non-DAC reporters, multilateral agencies reporting their own outflows (such as IDA, the regional development banks, UN agencies, Gavi, and the Global Fund), and private foundations.

The table also carries recipient-side indicators, ODA per capita, and ODA as a percentage of the recipient's GNI.

Totals against DAC1

At the developing countries total, a donor's DAC2A net ODA equals its DAC1 bilateral ODA in net disbursements. In-donor refugee costs, administrative costs, and similar items sit in "developing countries, unspecified", so the sum of individual countries is lower than DAC1 bilateral ODA, and much lower for donors with high refugee costs.

DAC2A is provided on a cash basis. Its net ODA subtracts loan repayments, so it will not match the grant-equivalent headline in DAC1 for years from 2018.

Imputed multilateral ODA

Imputed multilateral ODA is the OECD's estimate of how much of each donor's core multilateral contributions reached each recipient. It is published for DAC countries, non-DAC countries, and EU Institutions. It takes each agency's geographical breakdown of its gross disbursements from core resources in the reference year and applies that breakdown to the donor's core contributions to the agency. It is a memo item, outside net ODA, and it does not sum to DAC1 multilateral ODA.

Bilateral net ODA plus imputed multilateral ODA gives a donor's total contribution to a recipient. When you read a figure on this convention, say in the reply that the bilateral part is net and why: "net bilateral, as DAC counts a donor's total contribution". The OECD figure attributes core contributions to recipients, while ONE's imputed multilateral sectors dataset attributes them to sectors with a different method, so the two do not reconcile.

Double counting and aggregates

Donors and recipients are provided as both individual entries and aggregates, and a sum that includes an aggregate alongside its members double counts.

• Donor aggregates are official donors (DAC countries, non-DAC countries, and multilaterals), DAC countries, DAC countries plus EU Institutions, DAC EU countries, DAC EU countries plus EU Institutions, the G7, non-DAC countries, other countries, multilaterals, and private donors. Multilaterals also split into sub-aggregates (the UN, the World Bank, the World Bank Group, regional development banks, and others) that overlap one another and the multilaterals total.
• Recipient aggregates are regions, income groups, other country groups, the developing countries total, and all recipients. Regions overlap (Africa contains Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa overlaps Eastern, Middle, Southern, and Western Africa), and most regions have an "unspecified" bucket for amounts not allocated to a country. Other country groups (SIDS, LLDCs, HIPCs, ACP states, fragile contexts, basin groupings, and more advanced developed countries) cut across regions and income groups. Income groups (LDCs, other low-income, lower-middle-income, and upper-middle-income countries, and unallocated by income) come in DAC and World Bank classifications. The developing countries total includes "developing countries, unspecified", and all recipients equals the developing countries total plus multilateral recipients.

Multilateral agencies appear as both recipients and donors. Multilateral recipients hold donors' core contributions to IDA, UNICEF, EU Institutions, and others. A total that counts money going into multilaterals and money they provide to developing countries counts it twice.

The two aggregates that add EU Institutions to member states (DAC countries plus EU Institutions, and DAC EU countries plus EU Institutions) contain both the members' contributions to EU Institutions and EU Institutions' own ODA. The members' contributions sit under multilateral recipients, so to the developing countries total these aggregates count EU money once. To all recipients they count it twice.

A recipient's total receipts are the sum of bilateral donors and multilateral donors. Adding a donor's imputed multilateral ODA to the multilateral agencies' own outflows counts the same money twice.

A regional total built from individual countries misses the region's unspecified bucket.

Particularities

Net ODA can be negative for a donor-recipient pair when loan repayments or debt-relief offsets exceed new disbursements.

The DAC list of ODA recipients changes as countries graduate, and historical data include a separate group of countries in transition. A long series for one recipient can stop, and aggregate recipient totals shift as countries join or leave the list.