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Working Better Together in a Team Europe Approach

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public
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Last Updated: 05 December 2025
A tool to help EU Delegations work better together with Member States as Team Europe and with like-minded partners and country stakeholders, through Team Europe Initiatives, joint programming and joint implementation.

Table of contents

4.1 OECD-DAC’s Creditor Reporting System (CRS)

The coverage and quality of the OECD-DAC’s Creditor Reporting System (CRS) is not matched by any other system. It presents centrally validated data on development assistance from all actors following a TE approach, showing official development assistance (ODA) as well as other official flows (OOFs).

The targeted reporting on TEIs in the CRS is possible through the existing keyword field, which was established in the context of COVID-19 reporting and has been opened up for different purposes following a discussion and written procedure at the Working Party on Development Finance Statistics (WP-STAT). The DAC Secretariat put forward a proposal150 to extend the use of the keyword field, suggesting a ‘hybrid’ approach to allow for two types of keywords: agreed keywords (‘hashtags’, to be approved by WP-STAT and valid for all members) and spontaneous keywords (freely chosen and reported by members). This approach creates the necessary flexibility to host financial TEI reporting through a spontaneous TEI keyword.

Given its characteristics, CRS data is currently the most appropriate basis for an aggregate reporting on contributions to TEIs. The following types of data (among others) can be differentiated:

  • Recipient (country/region/unallocated)
  • Sector
  • Type of aid (budget support, project-type interventions, experts and other technical assistance etc.)
  • Channel (public sector, private sector institutions, NGOs & civil society, multilateral organisations etc.)
  • Flow (ODA grants, ODA loans, OOFs)
  • Year

Beyond that, private finance mobilised from the private sector by the official sector is also of relevance to the financial tracking of TEIs. Due to confidentiality concerns, OECD only publishes such data at aggregate levels which would not allow to identify contributions to TEIs even if development partners flag them with a keyword in their CRS (and TOSSD) reporting. However, OECD has agreed to share an overview of the actors following a TE approach data on mobilised private finance broken down by keywords with the Commission once available. Therefore, all actors following a TE approach should flag the mobilised private finance with the TEI keyword(s) as appropriate in their reporting. The Commission intends to take this data into account in its Team Europe approach reporting on financial contributions to TEIs, using the data at an aggregate level.

The extraction of contributions to TEIs from the CRS is only feasible based on a comprehensive CRS datafile available on the OECD. Data Explorer website for downloading; contributions are not directly visible in the online database itself. This means that retrieving this data requires expert skills and time. The Team Europe Explorer facilitates the search for relevant interventions (projects/programmes) and disbursements for the users through a TEI flag. However, it does not display a complete picture of contributions to TEIs as it can only reflect the ODA data reported to the OECD’s CRS and IATI as far as it is flagged as contributing to TEIs by the actors following a Team Europe approach, not the OOFs or complementary manually reported elements.

150 https://one.oecd.org/document/DCD/DAC/STAT(2021)38/en/pdf