The whole concept of geography is an important one in ODA management. The countries an activity is seen to benefit is one of the primary factors that make the activity eligible for ODA funding.
Countries 'graduate' from the eligibility list meaning they are no longer eligible for ODA funding.
Each benefitting country comes from a code list defined by DSIT (via OECD) which includes the code, naming, region membership and graduation status:
The application collects and stores any number of benefitting countries in
benefitting_countries an attribute of an Activity.
When rendering any view, all records are applicable regardless of graduation status as we may be rendering historical activities.
When collecting new records, only non graduated countries are valid.
Applicable countries are easily accessed via BenefittingCountry:
BenefittingCountry.all
BenefittingCountry.non_graduated
Based on the benefitting countries assigned to an activity, we can derive the region, see below.
Is calculated based on an activity's benefitting countries. It always results in one single region being returned to cover the chosen countries.
The region is not stored, it is calculated based on the current benefitting countries.
The regions and levels are loaded at application boot from the following code lists:
The regions are defined by DSIT (via OECD), a sample of which is show below:
| Region | Sub-region 1 | Sub-region 2 | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | North of Sahara | North of Sahara | Egypt |
| Africa | South of Sahara | Middle Africa | Gabon |
| Africa | South of Sahara | Southern Africa | Botswana |
| Africa | South of Sahara | Southern Africa | Namibia |
| Americas | South America | South America | Brazil |
Example calculations of a benefitting region value:
- Egypt + Gabon = Africa (Region level)
- Gabon + Botswana = South of Sahara (Sub-region 1 level)
- Botswana + Namibia = Southern Africa (Sub-region 2 level)
- Egypt + Brazil = Developing countries, unspecified (> 1 top level region)
'Developing countries, unspecified' is a special case where so many countries benefit that they span multiple regions.
Where an existing activity has recipient_region but no recipient_country and
no intended_beneficiaries, we:
- leave the new
benefitting_countriesfield empty - report the
regionas set inActivity#recipient_region
This is the case for a number of historical activities, see below.
A significant number of activities have their geography stored using a prior model made up of:
Activity::recipient_region
Activity::recipient_country
Activity::intended_beneficiaries
The logic for this was
- users selects either recipient region or recipient country geography, stored
as
geography - based on that, users select one region or country including a catch all region know as 'Developing countries, unspecified'
- users are asked if they wish to add more countries regardless of the responses
above, this is stored as
requires_additional_benefitting_countries - user can choose any number of countries as the
intended_beneficiaries
All of this data is now read only and kept, the rational for keeping it around is:
- for a closed (or completed) activity there is no appetite to update the data as there is little value in doing so
- for an activity with recipient region we do not know if the intent is 'all countries in the region' or 'some countries from that region' and so we cannot migrate to the new fields
- we require recipient region in these cases to calculate the region
As the service matures and the data with it, we may be able to remove some of these columns.