Guidance

International Climate Finance TA KPI 2: number of individuals and organisations informed by International Climate Finance technical assistance

Published 1 March 2024

Purpose of the document

International Climate Finance (ICF) is Official Development Assistance (ODA) from the UK to support developing countries to reduce poverty and respond to the causes and impacts of climate change. These investments help developing countries to:

• adapt and build resilience to the current and future effects of climate change
• pursue low-carbon economic growth and development
• protect, restore and sustainably manage nature
• accelerate the clean energy transition

ICF is spent by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). This methodology note explains how to calculate one of the key performance indicators (KPI) that we use to measure the achievements of UK ICF.

The intended audience is ICF programme teams, results leads, climate analysts and our programme implementing partners. Visit www.gov.uk/guidance/internationalclimate-finance to learn more about UK International Climate Finance, its results and read case studies.

Rationale

Technical assistance (TA) forms an important part of the UK Government’s International Climate Finance (ICF) programming, both through specific TA programmes, such as UKPACT (Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions), and as one component of broader programmes alongside financial policy support, capital investment or other interventions, for example FCDO’s Results Based Financing for Low Carbon Energy Access.

Most monitoring and reporting approaches currently assume capital spending, either implicitly or explicitly, and so are not well suited for tracking the activities and performance of TA activities or programmes. Additionally, ICF TA is often provided alongside other support such as capital investment from UK government or another development partner, TA support from other organisations, and national government financial and technical contributions. This makes it more challenging or even impossible to isolate results that are specifically attributable to ICF TA support. UK government has therefore developed a series of new indicators to support the measurement of ICF TA’s contributions to results. ^{[footnote 1]}

ICF TA KPI 2 seeks to provide a high-level indicator of the scale of ICF TA support delivered to beneficiaries for climate action, by measuring both the number of individuals and the number of organisations that have received TA from the ICF.

Summary table

[Column header]	[Column header]
Units	2.1) Absolute number of individuals 2.2) Absolute number of organisations
Headline data to be reported	2.1) Number of individuals that are beneficiaries of ICF TA 2.2) Number of organisations that are beneficiaries of ICF TA
Disaggregations	sector; type of TA support; actor that support has been provided to; mitigation or adaptation theme (or both); country; for 2.1 only, Sex, Gender, Geography and Disability
Revision history	January 2026: Added DSIT to relevant section; Added a ‘both’ option for mitigation/adaptation theme; Clarified guidance on counting and double counting individuals and organisations; Editorial changes to improve clarity, consistency and transparency. February 2023: clarified the requirement to report the number of individuals and the number of organisations separately; included additional guidance on the data disaggregation for organisational beneficiaries; included additional example of excluded indirect beneficiaries; annex D on reporting against both ICF KPI 1 and ICF TA KPI 2; included additional disaggregation categories; updated worked example template to report against multiple disaggregation categories; included additional guidance on reporting ICF TA KPI 2.1 and 2.2 separately
Timing	When to report: ICF programmes will be required to report ICF results once each year in March. Consider how much time is needed to collect data required to report ICF results and plan accordingly. It is recommended the data is collected alongside the programmes annual review where possible. Reporting lags: Your programme may have produced results estimates earlier in the year, for example during a programme’s Annual Review. It is acceptable to provide these results as long as they were produced in the 12 months preceding the March results commission. In some cases, data required for producing results estimates will be available after the results were achieved. If results cannot be estimated until over a year away from when a results estimate will be produced, this should be noted in the results return.
Links across the ICF KPI portfolio	ICF TA KPI 2 is linked with ICF KPI 1, which reports the number of people supported to better adapt to the effects of climate change. Refer to Annex D for more information on how to report against both ICF TA KPI 2 and ICF KPI 1.

Technical definition

This indicator reports the number of beneficiaries of ICF TA along 2 dimensions: individuals and organisations. This indicator accounts for all forms of TA delivered, ranging from training workshops to informational products and feasibility studies.

This is an output level indicator that does not aim to measure the success, effectiveness or impact of that TA support – other results should be assessed through other indicators or evaluations.

Technical assistance

Technical assistance is a form of non-financial development assistance provided by specialists, which may be either local or international, and from the public sector, private sector, NGOs, or academia. This assistance can be provided in many forms, including sharing information and expertise, providing training, sharing technical data or providing access to data platforms, and consulting services. It contrasts with other forms of assistance such as capital investments or grants to support the ongoing operating costs of a programme or initiative. TA may be provided directly by ICF or through funding that allows beneficiaries to purchase TA services.

TA can be provided in many different ways and can serve many different purposes. TA services and products typically include:

• supporting individuals in gaining knowledge or capacity through training, workshops, conferences
• sharing information and advice through knowledge products, support for project planning or policy development, providing data or climate information
• sharing experience through knowledge shares and secondments, expert guidance, study tours, research, development etc.

See Annex B for full definitions of TA products and services and of the behavioural or organisational changes that ICF TA has typically aimed to support, based on a 2019 review of DESNZ’s portfolio of international TA support.

ICF support

ICF support refers to assistance provided by a UK government ICF programme that has contributed to climate action in a specific country. It does not include a qualification based on the volume of funding provided by ICF or whether UK government is the sole provider of support.

Beneficiaries

A beneficiary refers to an individual person or organisation to whom the TA is provided with the intention of supporting climate action.

Individual beneficiaries: recipients of direct and targeted support provided to them as individuals, such as training, participation in a workshop, conference or seminar, or through taking part in a study tour or roadshow event. This should not include all individual members of an organisation that has received support at the aggregate, institutional level. It should also not include indirect beneficiaries.

Organisation beneficiaries: recipients of direct and targeted support provided to an organisation or institution rather than directly to the individuals within the institution. For example different types of organisations include:

• at the public sector level: individual ministries, committees, state owned enterprises and governmental agencies
• at the private sector level: business organisations (for example, cooperatives, trade associations), banks, financial institutions, and businesses
• at the NGO/civil society level: NGOs, civil society groups
• at the academia level: universities

Different teams within the organisations listed above should not be counted as individual organisations. For example, in cases where support has been provided both to a policy team working on energy efficiency and a policy team working on renewables, both of which are in the Ministry of Energy, this should count as one organisation supported, not 2.

Note that in many cases, TA to individuals may be provided as part of support provided to the organisation they are employed at, and so it may be appropriate to report both the organisation support and the individuals supported in results. This is discussed further below.

Methodological summary

To determine the number of beneficiaries supported by ICF TA, programmes should follow the approach set out below:

1. Determine which individual and/or organisation beneficiaries are to be included in the results.

2. Count the number of individual beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.1) and organisation beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.2) supported for each disaggregation category (where available).

3. Report number of individual beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.1) and organisation beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.2) supported by ICF TA against appropriate disaggregation categories.

Methodology

To calculate the number of beneficiaries supported by ICF TA:

1. Determine which individual and/or organisation beneficiaries are to be included in the results

Before quantifying the number of beneficiaries supported, programmes should verify that the TA support provided can be classified as having supported beneficiaries following the guidance below.

Programmes should include cases where direct and targeted TA has been delivered to individual or organisation beneficiaries in either the public sector, the private sector (including smallholder farmers), academia and/or NGOs/civil society. Programmes should only include cases where there are direct and targeted beneficiaries of ICF TA:

• direct beneficiaries are defined as individuals or organisations that are recipients of TA support. For example, people receiving training, a company being supported with specialist expertise, or the individuals attending a conference
• targeted beneficiaries are defined as individuals or organisations that are specific recipients of TA support. This means those beneficiaries for which the TA is intended to support climate action

Programmes should verify whether support is direct and targeted based on programme design and implementation documents, validated by details on how the TA support has been provided in practice within the programme. Although specific beneficiaries may not have been identified at the business case or original design stage, they need to be identified before the TA activity was delivered. For example, those who were specifically invited, in advance, to participate in training schemes and/or workshops are targeted beneficiaries.

Programmes should not include cases where beneficiaries have been indirectly supported through ICF TA. Indirectly supported beneficiaries are those who were either untargeted and/or indirect recipients of TA.

• indirect beneficiaries are those who benefit from the TA but did not receive any TA. For example, individuals working in operations at the Ministry of Transport in the Philippines have received training to improve the day-to-day operation of a policy influencing bus routes to minimise emissions. This allows the supported individuals to have more time advising other individuals implementing a policy limiting the number of cars entering the centre of cities to reduce emissions. The individuals working in the policy with cars have only indirectly benefited from TA and therefore should not be counted
• untargeted beneficiaries refer to those who receive the TA but for whom it was not intended or there is no expectation for climate action. For example, a workshop is organised on forestry data management for the ministry of forests in Ivory Coast. It is open to anyone who is interested in the subject area, and some PhD students attend the workshop. The PhD students are untargeted beneficiaries

However, sometimes TA is intentionally designed to support other beneficiaries, for example ‘train-the-trainer’ programmes or supporting households through delivering support to one adult in the household. In the cases where this is a specific design feature, that is, the TA is provided to a person with the specific intention of the TA being transmitted to other targeted beneficiaries with the aim of supporting climate action, then the programme can consider the secondary targeted beneficiaries as both direct and targeted and can report the number of people and organisations supported within this indicator. In the example of a train-the-trainer programme in which educators are trained in sustainable forestry practices to then deliver this training to wood producers, the programme should count the wood producers as direct and targeted beneficiaries.

2. Count the number of individual beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.1) and organisation beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.2) supported for each disaggregation category (where available)

Where programmes have determined that they have provided direct and targeted TA support to individual or organisation beneficiaries, programmes should count the number of beneficiaries supported. Specifically, the number of individuals supported by ICF TA, and the number of organisations supported by ICF TA should be counted.

Quantifying the number of individuals supported by ICF TA

When TA has been delivered at the individual level, the programme should record the number of individuals supported, subject to the criteria above. As noted above, when the TA has been provided at the organisation level, programmes should not count all the people in the organisation as individual beneficiaries.

Programmes should record the number of individuals who have received direct and targeted support from TA in the form of workshops, training events/courses, conferences, product/technology demonstrations, high level delegations, study tours and roadshows. However, this list is not exhaustive, and it may be that other forms of TA are provided to targeted people, in which case these should also be counted in the number of individual beneficiaries.

Quantifying the number of organisations supported by ICF TA

The number of organisations should be counted either when the TA has been delivered at the organisational level or when an organisation has benefitted from support provided to individual beneficiaries that aims to support their action within an organisation.

Programmes should record the number of organisations that have benefited from TA in the form of secondments; specialist research; strategic organisational guidance; expert guidance and review; public awareness campaigns; project studies and plans; data, software, tools and models; and research and development. However, this list is not exhaustive, and it may be that other forms of TA are provided at an organisational level.

To determine whether individuals should be counted as well as the organisation, programmes should consider whether the TA activity delivers at the organisational level through the provision of TA services to individuals. For example, TA delivered at the organisational level could take the form of expertise, such as a cost-benefit analysis and a scoping study that helps a sustainable forest business write a bid to receive funds to improve the sustainability of cocoa production. In this case, as individuals are not targeted only the organisation should be counted.

Alternatively, if training is provided to members of a government ministry with the intention of increasing the capacity in the ministry department, programmes should record both the ministry and the individuals themselves as having been supported.

The difference between these 2 examples is that in the first case, individuals are simply the conduit through which the TA reaches the organisation, and the intended outcome is organisational improvement rather than individual capacity development. In the second case, the TA is delivered directly to identifiable individuals with the explicit aim of increasing their skills or knowledge, and the organisation benefits as a result of their enhanced capacity. Therefore, only the organisation is counted in the first example, whereas both the individuals and the organisation should be counted in the second.

However, in the event that individuals receive support unrelated to their organisation’s activities or where the organisation itself has not been targeted, then the programme should only record the number of individuals supported. For example, the Vietnamese Minister of the Environment is invited to attend a training course to improve his or her negotiation skills for the next UNFCCC conference. The Ministry of Environment is not the targeted beneficiary, and neither is the party to which the official belongs. Hence no organisation should be counted in this instance, only the individual.

Another example might be smallholder farmers who often do not belong to a cooperative and act on their own. If such smallholder farmers receive TA on sustainable agricultural practices through workshops with the aim of reducing deforestation, the TA would have only been delivered at the individual level to individuals with no organisation allegiances, and hence only individuals should be counted.

Programmes should not count individual or organisation beneficiaries more than once in their results, even if they have received several different interventions within a programme supporting the same person or organisation in different ways. For example, a civil servant from the Ministry of Agriculture receives training for emissions monitoring and reporting, and they also go to a conference where they meet with other civil servants who are working in emissions monitoring and reporting. This would only count as one beneficiary even though there are 2 interventions because the same individual has been supported in both cases. Equally, if 2 different policy teams in the Ministry of Energy receive support, programmes should only record one organisation as being supported.

3. Report number of individual beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.1) and organisational beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.2) supported by ICF TA against appropriate disaggregation categories

Report the number of beneficiaries supported by ICF TA for each individual year to date and cumulatively for individual and organisational beneficiaries. Individuals and organisations should not be double counted either for in-year reporting or across years. The point at which the beneficiary can be reported is after the TA activity has occurred and should no longer be counted for other support received in the same year or for support received in following years. Programmes should disaggregate reported data based on the sector of the beneficiary that has received the TA support: public sector actors, private sector actors, NGO/civil society actors, or academia.

Results for individual beneficiaries should be further disaggregated according to standard ICF guidance for headcount data where feasible: sex, disability, age, and geography.

To avoid double counting across the portfolio, organisation beneficiaries should always be reported by name, so that repeated support to the same organisation can be identified and removed. Where names are unavailable, delivery partners should apply their own internal checks to ensure that organisations are counted only once.

For individual beneficiaries, programme teams should work with delivery partners to ensure that systems are in place to identify when the same individuals have been supported multiple times. Where individuals are named or otherwise identifiable, programme teams must ensure that all data collection and storage complies with relevant data protection and safeguarding requirements in the country where the data is held.

If only aggregate numbers are provided and it is not possible to identify individuals uniquely, teams should still take reasonable steps to understand the risk of double counting—such as seeking clarification from delivery partners on their data processes or requesting anonymised unique identifiers. Where uncertainty remains, programme teams should document information requests made, any remaining data gaps, and how risks of double counting have been handled.

Where it is not possible to track individuals or confirm whether repeat participation has occurred, programmes may apply an adjustment factor to reduce the reported number of beneficiaries. This should be based on reasonable assumptions about the likelihood of repeat participation—drawing on delivery partner insights, programme records, or historical participation patterns—and the basis for the adjustment should be clearly documented.

Programmes should also provide evidence supporting their calculations in notes accompanying reported data, including:

• details on how the programme determined that ICF TA support has provided direct and targeted support to beneficiaries • the categories of direct beneficiaries within each country: public sector, private sector, academia, NGO/civil society. Programmes including secondary targeted beneficiaries in their reporting should specify the link between the ICF TA product or service and the secondary targeted beneficiaries

Programmes should record data against the following disaggregation categories, where the data is available:

• sector
• type of TA support
• actor that support has been provided to
• mitigation or adaptation theme, or both
• for 2.1 only: sex, gender, geography and disability

Further details on these disaggregation categories are available in Annex A: Data disaggregation.

Worked example

An ICF-funded programme in Peru is supporting the creation of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the sustainable forestry sector, with the aim of reducing deforestation. The programme does so by delivering TA to the public sector, to foster an enabling environment for PPPs, and to the private sector, to help them participate in PPPs.

So far, the programme has delivered the following support:

• 3 workshops to a cocoa cooperation called ‘Cocoa4Future’, attended by all the cooperative members each time (20 attendees), with the aim of raising awareness of the impacts of deforestation and showing them practices that could improve their productivity while reducing the quantity of land required to grow cocoa
• Cocoa4Future and 3 of its key members are invited to visit a sustainable cocoa cooperative in Brazil who have implemented a number of different sustainable practices
• an invitation to a team of 5 people from the regional government’s Ministry of Agriculture to attend a workshop. At the workshop examples of different regional government policies to help with the sustainable management of forests are discussed, including testimonials from 3 civil servants about their challenges and how they had overcome them
• 30 community leaders from around the protected forest border have been invited to an awareness raising workshop on the negative impacts of deforestation on their livelihoods and the steps that are available to them to hold people that are carrying out deforestation activities accountable. One of the steps is informing the community leaders of the formal complaint channel connected to an operations team in the regional government who enforces the protection of forests

1. Determine which individual and/or organisation beneficiaries are to be included in the results

To report the number of beneficiaries, the programme needs to determine where TA was delivered in a direct and targeted manner to support beneficiaries. This means that beneficiaries have received TA themselves and that the TA was targeted towards them.

In the support described above the following received direct and targeted support:

• the 20 attendees of the cocoa cooperative Cocoa4Future received training from workshops and learnt about the sustainable practices available to them
• the same cooperative Cocoa4Future and 3 of its key members were invited (and hence targeted) to visit another cocoa cooperative who have implemented sustainable practices in Brazil, and therefore have directly received TA
• the team of 5 people from regional government were invited to attend a workshop, who directly benefited from TA
• the 30 community leaders that were invited to attend a workshop on the impact of deforestation and the action that they can take were targeted and direct receivers of support

The following individuals / organisations did not meet the criteria:

• in the workshop attended by a team in the regional government, there were also 3 civil servants who shared their testimonials. They attended the workshop and hence ‘directly received TA’ however they were not targeted, as the programme did not invite them with an aim for them to take any climate actions
• in the workshop delivered to community leaders, information was shared on how to use official channels of complaint to reduce deforestation. This has been beneficial to the operations team in regional government who have had their workload reduced thanks to whistle-blowers. However, the operations team did not receive any TA directly and hence do not meet the criteria

2. Count the number of individual beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.1) and organisation beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.2) supported for each disaggregation category (where available)

Following the identification of which beneficiaries received direct and targeted support, the programme should count the number of beneficiaries, in the form of organisations and individuals supported.

From the example above:

• the 20 attendees from the cooperative (all the members) were targeted and directly receive TA. They were supported in their capacity as cooperative members, and Cocoa4Future is also a beneficiary; the result is 20 people and 1 organisation
• Cocoa4Future and 3 of its key members were invited to a visit. However, they have already been counted as beneficiaries and there should not be any double counting; the result remains 20 people and 1 organisation
• the regional government team, was constituted of 5 people who received the training with the aim of also increasing the capacity of the regional government’s Ministry of Agriculture; the result is now 25 people and 2 organisations
• the 30 community leaders have been supported and should be counted. However, they were invited in their capacity as community leaders and not part of any organisation, hence no organisation should be counted here; the result is now 55 people and 2 organisations

The final result for the number of beneficiaries from the support provided is 55 people and 2 organisations.

3. Report number of individual beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.1) and organisation beneficiaries (ICF TA KPI 2.2) supported by ICF TA against appropriate disaggregation categories

These numbers should be reported, taking into account what type of actor has been supported (public sector, private sector, academia, civil society/NGO). The programme should also disaggregate people between sex, disability, age and geography where feasible. The reported numbers should be supported with evidence of beneficiaries being targeted and receiving TA directly. The programme should report the results in 2 tables, following this example:

Number of organisations supported by ICF TA in Year 1

Name of organisation	Sector	Actor	Type of TA	Theme
Cocoa4Future	Agriculture	NGO/civil society	Technical capacity building	Mitigation
SustainbleCocoa	Agriculture	NGO/civil society	Awareness raising	Adaptation

Number of individuals supported by ICF TA in Year 1 (disaggregated)

	Public sector	Private sector	Academia	NGOs/civil society	Total
Number of men supported	4	12	0	14	30
Number of women supported	1	8	0	16	25
Number of people with disabilities	0	2	0	1	3
Number of people without disabilities	5	18	0	29	52
Number of rural people	0	2	0	14	16
Number of urban people	5	18	0	16	39
Number of child direct beneficiaries (age 0 to 14)
Number of youth direct beneficiaries (age 15 to 24)
Number of adult direct beneficiaries (age 25 to 64
Number of elder direct beneficiaries (age 65 and over)

Data quality

Some data will be available directly from programmes, for example from project-level monitoring. It is the responsibility of the recipients of ICF funding, or a third-party auditing entity, to collect data. This information will need to be kept up to date by liaising with programme managers.

There may be varying degrees of quality of data, from data generated by large UK Government projects with high quality, data produced by multilateral partners, where their origin may be from government partners’ data systems or directly from implementing organisations. In the latter case the data may may be of lower quality and require further verification.

Where there are individual beneficiaries of TA, programmes will need to track some identifying information of individuals and organisations (including at least their names) to track beneficiaries across years and to avoid double counting. All data collection and storage of personal, identifying, or sensitive information regarding organisations and individuals being supported by ICF TA should be compliant with the data storage and safeguarding regulations in the country or countries where data is collected and stored.

Portfolio ICF results are published following the UK statistics authority Code of Practice for Statistics. This means that we make efforts to maximise the trustworthiness, quality, and value of the statistics.

To support ICF data quality:

1. Review ICF KPI results provided by programme partners, ensuring that methodologies have been adhered to, and calculations are documented and correct.

2. Ask a suitable analyst or climate adviser to quality assure ICF results before submission.

3. Submit ICF results following the instructions specific to your department. Include supporting documentation of calculations and any concerns about data quality.

4. A revision to historical results may be needed if programme monitoring systems or methodologies are improved, or historical data errors are found. Update results for earlier years as necessary and make a note in the return. ICF results are reported cumulatively, therefore it is important to make these corrections.

Questions about results reporting can be discussed with central ICF analysts, who undertake a further stage of quality assurance before publication.

Annex A: Data disaggregation

It is recommended that the data is disaggregated by the following categories, where available:

Sector

Emissions reductions / avoided should be disaggregated by sector as defined by the UNFCCC Inventory Categories:

• energy supply
• industrial processes
• business
• public
• residential
• transport
• agriculture
• fisheries and aquaculture
• waste management
• forestry
• land/sea-use and land/sea-use change
• water

Type of TA support

The categories of TA support are based on a review of existing DESNZ TA and a sample of FCDO TA, classified by the goal the TA aims to support.

Capacity building

• institutional capacity building: building capacity by improving institutional processes within organisations or helping establish new institutions
• technical capacity building: building capacity by improving technical expertise within organisations

Policy support and evidence

• awareness raising: bringing attention to a certain programme, project, cause, or issue
• national policy support: assisting in the design, update, or operation of a national policy in a supported country
• international policy support: assisting in the design, update, or operation of an international policy

Project and investment support

• project development support: providing assistance to develop projects more quickly or more effectively
• process/asset operation support: providing guidance to improve operational aspects of stakeholder
• financing support: providing assistance to developing financial offerings, financial instrument or arrange access to finance
• public-private co-ordination support: supporting collaboration between public and private actors for the development of climate-relevant investments

Actor that has received support

Programmes should disaggregate reported data based on the actor that has received support from ICF technical assistance.

• public sector: public sector actors such as national governments, sub-national regional or local governments, governmental agencies, or other public bodies
• private sector: private sector such as businesses, financial institutions, smallholder farmers and private actors, such as households
• finance sector: finance sector such as financial institutions and banking and capital markets
• NGO/civil society: NGOs, philanthropic organisations or civil society groups
• academia: academic institutions or organisations

Where programmes have supported multiple categories of actors, programmes should report each type of actor supported for the given programme. For organisational beneficiaries, the names of the organisations supported should also be provided.

Mitigation or adaptation theme

Policies should be disaggregated according to the climate change theme supported by the policy:

• climate change adaptation
• climate change mitigation or
• both

Definitions of climate change adaptation and mitigation should be based on those included in the ‘OECD DAC Rio Markers for Climate Handbook’ ^{[footnote 2]}

Individual-level disaggregation

UK government is strongly committed to the principle that every person counts and should be counted. This principle has endorsed the United Nations Global Partnership for Development Data and is now operationalising this commitment. UK government has prioritised 4 disaggregation axes, which are required for all programmes going forward.

Whenever possible, such programmes should assess the impact of their interventions through surveys which disaggregate population data in this way. When this is not feasible, however, these programmes are permitted to utilise available population data or opt out altogether.

Sex

Programmes should disaggregate by males/females. Disaggregation should be based on actual data, not models or estimates. Report:

• male beneficiaries

• female beneficiaries

• disaggregated data by sex is not feasible to collect

Disability:

Programmes should incorporate the Washington Group ‘short set’ of 6 disability questions to their population surveys^{[footnote 3]}. While all UK government programmes are expected to apply and track all 6 questions in beneficiary surveys, at the indicator level UK government expects reporting towards 2 categories: disabled and not disabled. Anyone who answers ‘a lot of difficulty’ or ‘cannot do it all’ to one or more of the 6 questions should be counted as disabled. Report:

• disabled beneficiaries

• not disabled beneficiaries

• disaggregated data by disability is not feasible to collect

Geography

At the indicator level, all programmes should report on whether individual beneficiaries are urban or rural. Report:

• urban beneficiaries

• rural beneficiaries

• disaggregated data by geography is not feasible to collect

While the concepts of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ are easily understood, in an era of migration and burgeoning peri-urban populations, the distinctions may blur in many cases. Moreover, there are substantial differences between how various countries approach this question, and there is no international agreed-upon definition. For statistical purposes, UK government (and the United Nations) allows each country to define urban and rural individually. You should follow the definitions set for your country by its National Statistics Office (or equivalent agency).

Age

While all programmes are expected to collect and analyse detailed data on the age of beneficiaries (see FCDO Guidance on Disaggregating Programme Data by Age), at the ICF KPI level ICF-affiliated programmes should report numbers consolidated into 4 categories: children, youth, adults, and elders. Report:

• of child direct beneficiaries (age 0 to 14)

• of youth direct beneficiaries (age 15 to 24)

• of adult direct beneficiaries (age 25 to 64)

• of elder direct beneficiaries (age 65 and over)

• disaggregated data by age is not feasible to collect

Annex B: Common forms of technical assistance in ICF programmes

Technical assistance is a broad term and includes a diverse set of means and aims of support. This annex defines the different types of TA products and services typically offered in ICF programmes (what is provided in practice) and common categories of TA support ( what the TA aims to achieve).

Common TA products and services

TA can be provided in many different ways and to serve many different purposes. TA services and products typically include:

• supporting individuals in gaining knowledge or capacity through training, workshops, conferences
• sharing information through knowledge products, supporting project planning or policy development, providing data or climate information
• sharing experience through knowledge shares and secondments, expert guidance, study tours

The table below provides an indication of where different TA products and services are most useful across those 3 areas.

TA product or service	Description	Supporting individuals	Sharing information	Sharing experience
Workshops	Presentations or discussions among small- or medium-sized groups	x	x	x
Training events and courses	Events or courses aimed to build understanding or capacity, can be one-off or a course of training, conducted externally or in-house	x	x
Conferences, seminars or networking events	Larger forums to share information and/or foster relationships between different actors	x	x	x
Secondments	Providing personnel to augment capacity, including short- or longer-term placements	x		x
Specialist research	Traditional consultancy-type services that address specific, practical questions and provide recommendations, including market, policy, legal, regulatory and technology research briefs		x	x
Strategic organisational guidance	Operational plans and systems, for example, HR planning		x	x
Expert guidance and review	Ad-hoc expert input on different issues, including direct provision of guidance and recruitment or provision of long-term expert staff		x	x
Product or technology demonstration	Demonstration of certain products or technologies to build understanding among users or policymakers	x	x	x
Study tours and roadshows	Educational or informational trips for beneficiaries to learn from others, including on technology use, technical and business practices and policy approaches		x	x
Public awareness campaigns	Engagement with civil society and/or the public to build awareness		x
High level delegations	Engagement on ministerial or equivalent level to build high-level political interest	x	x	x
Data, software, tools and models	An output that can be used to support decision-making, typically across multiple decisions		x
Research and development	Research and development (R&D) services, may include commercial or academic research		x

Annex C: Guidance on the use of this indicator methodology to support appraisals

The results from this indicator are not directly suitable for incorporation into a traditional cost-benefit analysis appraisal, as results – the number of individual and organisational beneficiaries supported – are not calculated in a monetised format and cannot easily be converted into monetary terms using typical appraisal techniques (such as willingness to pay analysis).

However, expected results could be used as an input to modified or alternative appraisal approaches, such as cost-effectiveness analysis (based on the unit cost of achieving results in supporting organisations and/or individuals) or multicriteria decision analysis.

To apply the methodology set out in this indicator to generate estimated results for the purposes of appraisal, users should:

• examine the programme design to identify where and how they expect each element of TA within the programme may support different actors. Users should first consider all elements of TA included in the programme design separately and consider which different actors or organisations in different countries this TA product or service may support, for example by providing training to government officials in Mexico, or by providing climate intelligence or expert guidance to climate insurance providers in Bangladesh. In considering these instances, users should set out how they expect that the TA will support the actors and the relevant countries to be supported

  • for some programmes it may be challenging to identify the range of specific beneficiaries that will be supported at the design stage, particularly if programmes are designed to be demand-led and/or responsive to needs that emerge over time. In these cases, programmes may need to make assumptions around the number of organisations and individuals that will be supported based on the level of reach that is feasible given the programme design and budget and based on previous experiences of uptake or usage of TA products and services
  • where programmes are uncertain about the scale of impact, they should be transparent about any assumptions made in estimating expected results (such as the assumed number of supported organisations or individuals) to enable robust sensitivity analysis of calculations
  • programmes should also apply appropriate caution in estimating impacts, as levels of uncertainty around the scale of impact are likely to increase as the scale of the beneficiary decreases. That is, individual-level results are likely to be more uncertain than organisation-level results, and both are likely to be more uncertain than country-level results reported under the equivalent indicator considering the number of countries supported

• aggregate the instances of beneficiaries expected to be supported to obtain an overall estimate of programme expected results. Users should take account of any cases where different TA products are offered to the same beneficiary, to avoid double counting of potential support

Use of these results as inputs to cost-effectiveness analysis or multi-criteria analysis should be carefully considered and may require users to more clearly specify the expected outputs to ensure comparability across different programmes. Many different types and scales of TA support may be provided to individuals and organisations, and by design different programmes may engage with very different numbers of beneficiaries.

For example, a programme that aims to support exchange of information through conferences may reach substantially more beneficiaries than a programme supporting an investment or government department. The use of the raw results from this indicator as the basis for decision making may risk prioritising programmes that have a broad reach (in terms of supporting a large number of different beneficiaries) above those that deliver the largest impact, in terms of the quality, duration or depth of support to beneficiaries.

Annex D: Guidance on reporting results across this indicator and ICF KPI 1

Where programmes provide both TA and capital support and so could potentially report results under both ICF KPI 1 and this indicator, or where another ICF programme provides capital towards the same activities or beneficiaries as a TA programme and could report results under ICF KPI 1, programmes can elect to report results under both this indicator and under ICF KPI 1. In these cases, programmes should refer to the guidance below on how to report results under each indicator. Note, reporting against ICF KPI 1 should be prioritised over ICF TA KPI 2.

1. Programmes should identify any activities or investments supported by TA through the programme and that give rise to support to individuals that are also supported by capital from the same programme or from another ICF programme.

2. In these cases, programmes may report against both indicators (ICF KPI 1 and ICF TA KPI 2).

• note that results from ICF KPI 1 and this indicator should never be aggregated, as this would risk double counting cases where those people that are supported are reported under both indicators
• the 2 indicators track different concepts: the number of people supported to cope with climate change directly attributable to ICF investments, and the scope of ICF TA support for people. They provide complementary measures of related, but different, results. Therefore, each set of results must be reported separately

3. For results to be reported under ICF KPI 1, programmes should identify the number of people supported consistent with the ICF KPI 1 methodology note.

• in cases where aggregate results are reported from a programme that provides both capital and TA components, these results may implicitly include results from TA support under ICF KPI 1. Nonetheless, programmes should apply the full ICF KPI 1 methodology

4. For results to be reported under the ICF TA KPI 2 indicator, calculate the number of individuals supported by ICF TA support using the methodology set out in this note.

5. Report results under their respective indicators.

• if a separate ICF programme has supported the activities leading to the people being supported (rather than the same programme) provide a note of the programme name alongside reported data

Acknowledgements

This document has been updated by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to reflect methodological changes following a pilot of the methodology produced by Vivid Economics with the assistance of the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, contracted through the EACDS Lot B service ‘Strengthening resilience and response to crises’, managed by DAI Europe Ltd. under contract to the UK Department for International Development. The original draft technical assistance methodology note is available from Devtracker.

This document builds on one of 5 draft Methodology Notes for new indicators for tracking results from technical assistance within ICF programmes, produced under the project Understanding Technical Assistance Options in International Climate Finance. The Vivid Economics project team includes Nick Kingsmill, Aurore Mallon, Fabian Knoedler-Thoma, John Ward and Dan Aylward-Mills.

Following the pilot of these new indicators, 4 of these have been taken forwards for reporting across ICF programmes as part of the annual results reporting.

1. Non-TA ICF KPIs take an attribution approach to reporting results, where programmes identify that they have had a causal role supporting results and then attribute results across ICF and any other development partners that have also played a causal role, based on the value of support provided to a programme. ↩

2. OECD DAC Rio Markers for Climate Handbook. ↩

3. The Washington Group was established under the United Nations Statistical Commission in 2001 to address the need for cross-nationally comparable population-based measures on disability. It is composed of representatives of National Statistical Offices around the world. These questions and further guidance for them can be found at: Washington Group ‘short set’ of disability questions. ↩