Notes about the Relief Aid dataset
==================================
Juan P. Zuluaga, jz31416@yahoo.com

* The data comes from tables published in http://www.reliefweb.int,
an information website from the Office of Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) of the UN. 

* This dataset is, as of today (December 18/2002), not clean enough. 
Data for recent years (2000-2002) would be entered in the next days.

* Fields are separated by the Bang ("!").
  
* The ID field was set arbitrarily, it just served the purpose of 
facilitating data cleaning. Same for fields DisasterType and 
DisasterType2. Ignore them for now. 

* The KEYNAME field identifies the specific disaster.

* DONOR_T is a code I gave to different kinds of donors. It can be 
a "Country" , or an NGO (if it is a Non-governmental organization), IGO (if it is
an agency of the UN o similar multilateral kind), BANK (if it is a
multilateral Bank, as the World Bank or the InterAmerican Development
Bank). 
There is a number of Red Cross/Red Crescent donor entities: National
Societies, the International Federation Of Red Cross Societies, and even the 
International Committee of the Red Cross (surprising, given its 
specialization in Humanitarian Law issues). We code "RC_natsoc" if the 
donor is a National Society (i.e. the American Red Cross); "RC_ifrcs"
if it is the International Federation; "RC_icrc" if it is the International
Committee, and "RC_undef" if the affiliation of teh entity is not clear. 
The code would be "Private" (if the donor is an organization 
whose main goal is not relief or philanthropy, i.e. a for-profit firm ), 
Natcom (a residual category of national comitees of support to the 
UNICEF, not being entirely a NGO or an IGO or a Private group...). The 
coding was made by just myself (JPZ) and should be taken with a grain 
of salt. 
 
* RECIPIENT, of course, mean the country that received the aid. An effort
was made to keep consistency in the names of countries; but the column
may not be entirely clean. A special note on regional disasters: sometimes
there was more than one country affected, the appeal was made in behalf
of a group of countries, and donors may not have specified teh destination 
country of their gift. I.e. Caribbean or Central AMerica. In a couple
of caases, I divided equally the amount among the four countries affected,
and recorded four lines of data (instead of the original single one).
  

* AID_T represents an attempt to categorize the kind of aid sent, inferred
from its description in AID. "I" means in-kind aid, material goods like
foodstuff or medicines. "C" Means Cash with no specific description of 
purpose or destination. "E" Means Earmarked Cash, when the description 
implies a well defined purpose or destination for teh money. Of course,
in some cases it is hard to infer from the description what was sent. My 
assumption is that Donors delegate more or less power over their donation
to the Recipients, "Cash" implying the greater power by the recipient to
do what they want with the resource, and "In-kind" representing the least
power delegated, with "Earmarked" as the middle ground. The coding was
made by myself (Juan P. Zuluaga), and the previous note applies with 
even greater emphasis, since the range of interpretation is greater. 
   "Technical AId" , represented by two indicators in Fields AID_T and TECH,  
show those cases in which the aid consisted of Technical Expertise and 
Manpower (i.e. Expert surveyors or Medical Doctors). When AID indicates such
aid, there is a "t" in TECH, empty if not. However, as sometimes it is
difficult to separate the Technical Aid from material means and goods, when 
in AID there is no mention of goods being transferred, I code AID_T as
"onlyT". When there _is_ mention of goods, there is a "I" in AID_T (and a
't' in TECH). Again, sometimes it is hard to tell. 

* VALUE represents the US Dollar value of that aid packet, in that year. 
A correction is certainly needed to adjust for changes in the value of
the dollar and of the worth of the local currency through time. In many
cases of "In-Kind" or "Technical" aid, there is no declared value. The
original data had a 0 in that column, I recoded it as a 'na'.

* CHANNEL represents the name of the institution through which the 
resource was sent. An effort was made to unify the nomenclature, but
more cleaninig is needed. Particulary, those NGOs with branches and 
programs in many countries pose some problems -- World Vision, World 
Vision USa and World Vision International, SCF, SCF UK and SCF Bangladesh,
are they the same? No effort was made to split data lines, if more than
one channel was named. 

* CHANNEL_T tries to code the type of channel. "Bilateral" (or "Direct" 
in 1992) is a name that comes from field CHANNEL, but its meaning is 
not entirely clear. Many times, also, the same entity that appear in 
the DONOR field, appears in the CHANNEL field -- meaning that they 
channeled the money themselves. These cases, indicated by a "1" in
the DON_eq_CH  field, may be in fact equivalent to the "Bilateral"
category discussed above. "IGO" means InterGovernmental Organization
(mostly UN agencies); "NGO" means Non Governmental Organizations. 
A  "Bank" indicates that a Multilateral Bank was teh channel. "GOV" 
indicates that a particular bureaucratic relief agency of the donor
government was the channel. "LOCALGOV" indicates that a particular 
bureaucratic entity of teh affected government (at the national or 
local level) was used as channel. The code "Ministeries" is 
assigned when a Governmental Ministery or Secretary is named as the
channel -- but it was not possible to know if the entity belonged 
to the donor or to the affected government. "Priv" was applied in
cases in which a Private (for profit) entity was named as the channel. 
In 
the field of Red Cross/Red Crescent institutions, a code of RC_donor
means that the aid was channeled through the Red Cross Society of the
donor country. A code of "RC_recip" means that the aid was channeled 
through the Red Cross Society of the affected country; "RC_ifrcs" 
indicates that the International Federation of The Red CRoss Societies
was the entity that channeled the aid. In a very few cases, countries
give aid through Red Cross Societies of third countries -- this is 
indicated as "RC-Other". "RC_self" is used when the donor was a RC 
society who channeled the aid itself. "RC_undef" was used when the 
channel was a Red Cross entity, ibut no additional information was 
possible (i.e. when only "Red Cross" is the name of the channel).
"MIX" indicates that two or more entities of
different type (i.e. UNICEF + SCF) were named as channels. Some cases
in which further information was needed, were indicated by "?". 
   This "CHANNEL_T" is the field that would need more work and cleaning,
to try to extract more meaningful (and perhaps fewer) categories. 

* DON_eq_CH , as explained before, takes the value "1" when DONOR==
CHANNEL, "0" otherwise. 

