Avoid duplicates in your indicators!
Technical Tips are quick ways to improve your data which you can easily apply for your next publication. This time: avoid duplicates in your result indicators. This can easily happen when you report both disaggregated results and totals.
Let’s have an example. Let’s say you measure ‘number of people reached’ and you want to also know how many young women there are among these ‘people reached’. Last year, you reached a thousand people, 600 of whom were young women. It may be tempting to do something like this:
Number of people reached total 1000
Number of young women reached 600
This is not correct! This is an indicator which can be (and will be) aggregated in dashboards. If you report it like this, you are actually reporting 1600 people reached, not 1000.
What you can do in these situations:
Number of young women reached 600
Number of other people reached 400
How you want to word the second indicator is your choice. You can also call it ‘Number of people (not young women) reached’ or ‘Number of young men reached’ if your target audience was exclusively young people anyway. As long as we (and others who use your data) can still add the total up and actually get the total, and not an inflated number.
If you know of activities (old or new) in which you did this incorrectly, please correct them. Even closed activities are still used in our overviews of activities.
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