Working Better Together in a Team Europe Approach

When operationalising the TEI keyword in their internal reporting systems, each actor following a TE approach can choose the level of granularity depending on the nature of their financial contributions to TEIs and their reporting capacities. The term ‘intervention’ will be used here as a general term that can be read as action, activity, project or programme. It is possible to flag the whole intervention as a contribution to a TEI or to flag only a part of the intervention which is relevant to a TEI.

In their decision on how they would like to implement the TEI keyword internally, actors following a TE approach should avoid overand under-reporting to the extent possible, by using as much granularity as feasible for accurate reporting. In cases where available information or reporting granularity are not sufficient, actors following a TE approach should make a sound judgment on the most adequate reporting. It should be considered that a slight over-reporting would be preferable to a substantial under-reporting on TEIs, given that this does not affect the amount of total development assistance reported under the three standards but only the share attributed to TEIs. This guidance does not prescribe any fixed criteria in the form of percentage shares in this regard.

In the CRS, the parts of an intervention can be disaggregated into several lines (multiple submission), each with an individual CRS identification number. In IATI, the TEI tag is to be reported at the level of the IATI activity. The Commission can offer support and organise exchange of best practices on the internal operationalisation of the TEI keyword (with examples) clarifying how to flag interventions as contributions to TEIs.

For information, the Commission has implemented a binary TEI flag in its internal system at action and contract level (i.e. commitment level 1 and commitment level 2). This flag will always refer to the whole contract and will thus apply to all disbursements under the respective contracts. This is because it is expected that any Commission-funded contract whose outputs contribute to a TEI will usually do so as a whole, meaning that flagging whole contracts should not imply over-reporting of the Commission’s contributions to TEIs.