Assign a Geography to an Activity

In this page:

Assign Geographies to Activity

DevResults tracks two types of geographies:

  • Locations (specific points on a map with GPS coordinates such as hospitals, schools, etc.).
  • Administrative Divisions (e.g. shapes or areas such as districts, provinces, states, etc.)

Indicators are defined with exactly one geographic disaggregation: either location or an administrative division (including the whole country or whole world).

  • If an activity reports on indicators disaggregated by location, locations must be assigned to the activity.
  • If an activity reports on indicators disaggregated by an administrative division, that type of administrative division must be assigned to the activity. For example, if an activity reports on an indicator with a geographic disaggregation of "district", one or more districts must be assigned to that activity. (Note: The whole country or whole world is assigned by default.)
An activity will not be able to report direct entry results unless it is assigned to geographies for its indicators' geographic disaggregations. (Data table indicators allow for implicit geographic assignments to be made through data table records alone, but it's still a good practice to add geography assignments to the activity.)

First, go to the Activities tab of the main menu, select your activity, and then go to that activity's Geography tab.

You'll see a map on the left and some tabs in the center. The Locations tab will always display; the tabs to the right of it will depend on your site's administrative divisions. If you are assigning the activity to a location, select locations; otherwise, select the relevant administrative division tab. In this example, we'll assign communes:

Click the drop-down arrow to the right and select the geography you want to add.

The geography (location, administrative division, etc.) will now appear in the list of geographies for that activity. Assign as many geographies as needed.

If the activity reports on all indicators in all the same geographies all the time, there's nothing else to do.  

Advanced Geography Settings

If the indicators or geographies vary over time, click the Advanced button in the right corner of the window.

The options you see here will depend on how many indicators this Activity reports on.

Checking the Active places vary over time box will add a timeline at the top with all your reporting periods on it, so you can assign different geographies for each reporting period.

By default, all reporting periods are mapped all the geographies you originally picked. To edit settings for a particular reporting period, click on that reporting period in the timeline view.

This will refresh the geographies tabs and you can add or remove geographies using the same process outlined above.

With the vary by reporting period option selected, clicking the Advanced menu again will give you the option to Apply to all future reporting periods. Checking this box copies the settings for the reporting period you're viewing to all the reporting periods that come after it. The system will prompt you to make sure you want to make the change.

Click Yes, apply to continue with the change.

The Different places report on different indicators option will only appear if the activity has multiple indicators.

Checking the box will produce a grid next to the geographies where you can select or de-select components of your results framework to specify which geographies report on which indicators.

Unchecking the box removes that portion of the framework's related indicators for this activity in this geography.

If your activity no longer works on certain components of your result framework, you can also de-select those components in a particular reporting period. Clicking Copy mapping forward... will apply your selection to all future reporting periods.

Note: De-selecting portions of your result framework only applies to direct entry indicators as data table indicators calculate automatically from raw data.

Note: If you are unable to complete these actions, then you do not have permission to assign geographies to activities. Please speak to your supervisor. 



Didn't answer your question? Please email us at help@devresults.com.