Working Better Together in a Team Europe Approach

The financial reporting on TEIs based on a single TEI code implemented internally through a binary TEI flag (yes/no), i.e. ‘TEI000’, allows to differentiate contributions by a number of types of data as specified above under CRS reporting and IATI reporting, including by recipient and by sector. In cases where there is only one TEI in one country and sector, this would allow to retrieve financial information related to an individual TEI. However, in general, it would not necessarily allow to attribute all the contributions to individual TEIs in a fully automatic manner: The keyword only marks them as relevant for TEIs as such, not for specific TEIs, and the expectation is that the differentiation by types of data would not be sufficient for a definite attribution of all financial contributions to individual TEIs given that there can be several TEIs in one country (including national and regional ones) in potentially overlapping sectors.

In order to automatically attribute all contributions to individual TEIs with certainty, the reporting would have to be based on a more sophisticated flagging, making use of many individual TEI keywords which draw on a list of unique identification codes for all TEIs (i.e. ‘TEI001’, ‘TEI002’ etc.), to be expanded whenever new TEIs are agreed. Implementing such an individual flagging of TEIs in internal systems for reporting to the available standards requires a very significant additional effort for actors following a TE and takes more time to become operational.

In light of the above and the comments received from actors following a TE approach, the Commission concluded as a compromise that all actors following a TE approach should, as a common minimum requirement, flag their contributions to TEIs based on a single TEI keyword, while actors following a TE approach who wish to take a more granular approach can use specific TEI keywords flagging individual TEIs. To thi s end, the Commission is providing an overview of all agreed TEIs, specifying their names and unique identification codes (spelling of the codes is essential). This overview is available to actors following a TE approach on Capacity4Dev (Team Europe group) and is updated on a regular basis. If all TE approach actors were able to flag TEIs individually, it would be possible to have aggregate reporting on individual TEIs.

Whenever else there is a need to know the total financial contributions (and mobilised private finance) to any specific TEI, for example as part of a case study or to publish certain examples, the management structure of the respective TEI could collect the figures from all actors following a TE approach who are involved. The political narrative for the individual TEIs can also include non-financial contributions as well as financial contributions for which systematic tracking is not possible.