Africa’s health won’t improve without reliable data and collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

,  and  at the Conversation: “…Africa has a data problem. This is true in many sectors. When it comes to health there’s both a lack of basic population data about disease and an absence of information about what impact, if any, interventions involving social determinants of health – housing, nutrition and the like – are having.

Simply put, researchers often don’t know who is sick or what people are being exposed to that, if addressed, could prevent disease and improve health. They cannot say if poor sanitation is the biggest culprit, or if substandard housing in a particular region is to blame. They don’t have the data that explains which populations are most vulnerable.

These data are required to inform development of innovative interventions that apply a “Health in All Policies” approach to address social determinants of health and improve health equity.

To address this, health data need to be integrated with social determinant data about areas like food, housing, and physical activity or mobility. Even where population data are available, they are not always reliable. There’s often an issue of compatability: different sectors collect different kinds of information using varying methodologies.

Different sectors also use different indicators to collect information on the same social determinant of health. This makes data integration challenging.

Without clear, focused, reliable data it’s difficult to understand what a society’s problems are and what specific solutions – which may lie outside the health sector – might be suitable for that unique context.

Scaling up innovations

Some remarkable work is being done to tackle Africa’s health problems. This ranges from technological innovations to harnessing indigenous knowledge for change. Both approaches are vital. But it’s hard for these to be scaled up either in terms of numbers or reach.

This boils down to a lack of funding or a lack of access to funding. Too many potentially excellent projects remain stuck at the pilot phase, which has limited value for ordinary people…..

Governments need to develop health equity surveillance systems to overcome the current lack of data. It’s also crucial that governments integrate and monitor health and social determinants of health indicators in one central system. This would provide a better understanding of health inequity in a given context.

For this to happen, governments must work with public and private sector stakeholders and nongovernmental organisations – not just in health, but beyond it so that social determinants of health can be better measured and captured.

The data that already exists at sub-national, national, regional and continental level mustn’t just be brushed aside. It should be archived and digitised so that it isn’t lost.

Researchers have a role to play here. They have to harmonise and be innovative in the methodologies they use for data collection. If researchers can work together across the breadth of sectors and disciplines that influence health, important information won’t slip through the cracks.

When it comes to scaling up innovation, governments need to step up to the plate. It’s crucial that they support successful health innovations, whether these are rooted in indigenous knowledge or are new technologies. And since – as we’ve already shown – health issues aren’t the exclusive preserve of the health sector, governments should look to different sectors and innovative partnerships to generate support and funding….(More)”

Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open Access) book edited by Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss: “Presenting rigorous and original research, this volume offers key insights into the historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces at play in the creation of world-class ICT innovations in Kenya. Following the arrival of fiber-optic cables in 2009, Digital Kenya examines why the initial entrepreneurial spirit and digital revolution has begun to falter despite support from motivated entrepreneurs, international investors, policy experts and others. Written by engaged scholars and professionals in the field, the book offers 15 eye-opening chapters and 14 one-on-one conversations with entrepreneurs and investors to ask why establishing ICT start-ups on a continental and global scale remains a challenge on the “Silicon Savannah”. The authors present evidence-based recommendations to help Kenya to continue producing globally impactful  ICT innovations that improve the lives of those still waiting on the side-lines, and to inspire other nations to do the same….(More)”

3 Ways data has made a splash in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Madolyn Smith at Data Driven Journalism: “impactAFRICA, the continent’s largest fund for data driven storytelling, has announced the winners of its water and sanitation contest. Journalists from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Zambia made waves with their stories, but three in particular stood out against the tide.

1. South Africa All At Sea

Sipho Kings‘ story on illegal fishing along South Africa’s coast for the Mail & Guardian shows how data from nanosatellites could solve the tricky problem of tracking illegal activities….

As well as providing a data driven solution to South Africa’s problem, this story has been credited with prompting increased naval patrols, which has uncovered a string of illegal fishing trawlers.

Read the story here.

2. Water Data for Nigeria

This tool, developed by Abiri Oluwatosin Niyi for CMapIT, tracks the supply and consumption of water in Nigeria. To combat a scarcity of data on public water resources, the project crowdsources data from citizens and water point operators. Data is updated in real-time and can be explored via an interactive map.

nigeria.PNG

Image: Water Data for Nigeria.

In addition, the underlying data is also available for free download and reuse.

Explore the project here.

3. Ibadan: A City of Deep Wells and Dry Taps

Writing for the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, Kolawole Talabi demonstrates a relationship between declining oil revenues and government water expenditure in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city, with detrimental impacts on its inhabitants health.

The investigation draws on data from international organisations, like UNICEF, and government budgetary allocations, as well as qualitative interview data.

Following the story’s publication, there has been extensive online debate and numerous calls for governmental action.

Read the story here….(More)”

What’s wrong with big data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Bridle in the New Humanist: “In a 2008 article in Wired magazine entitled “The End of Theory”, Chris Anderson argued that the vast amounts of data now available to researchers made the traditional scientific process obsolete. No longer would they need to build models of the world and test them against sampled data. Instead, the complexities of huge and totalising datasets would be processed by immense computing clusters to produce truth itself: “With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” As an example, Anderson cited Google’s translation algorithms which, with no knowledge of the underlying structures of languages, were capable of inferring the relationship between them using extensive corpora of translated texts. He extended this approach to genomics, neurology and physics, where scientists are increasingly turning to massive computation to make sense of the volumes of information they have gathered about complex systems. In the age of big data, he argued, “Correlation is enough. We can stop looking for models.”

This belief in the power of data, of technology untrammelled by petty human worldviews, is the practical cousin of more metaphysical assertions. A belief in the unquestionability of data leads directly to a belief in the truth of data-derived assertions. And if data contains truth, then it will, without moral intervention, produce better outcomes. Speaking at Google’s private London Zeitgeist conference in 2013, Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman, asserted that “if they had had cellphones in Rwanda in 1994, the genocide would not have happened.” Schmidt’s claim was that technological visibility – the rendering of events and actions legible to everyone – would change the character of those actions. Not only is this statement historically inaccurate (there was plenty of evidence available of what was occurring during the genocide from UN officials, US satellite photographs and other sources), it’s also demonstrably untrue. Analysis of unrest in Kenya in 2007, when over 1,000 people were killed in ethnic conflicts, showed that mobile phones not only spread but accelerated the violence. But you don’t need to look to such extreme examples to see how a belief in technological determinism underlies much of our thinking and reasoning about the world.

“Big data” is not merely a business buzzword, but a way of seeing the world. Driven by technology, markets and politics, it has come to determine much of our thinking, but it is flawed and dangerous. It runs counter to our actual findings when we employ such technologies honestly and with the full understanding of their workings and capabilities. This over-reliance on data, which I call “quantified thinking”, has come to undermine our ability to reason meaningfully about the world, and its effects can be seen across multiple domains.

The assertion is hardly new. Writing in the Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer decried “the present triumph of the factual mentality” – the predecessor to quantified thinking – and succinctly analysed the big data fallacy, set out by Anderson above. “It does not work by images or concepts, by the fortunate insights, but refers to method, the exploitation of others’ work, and capital … What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim.” What is different in our own time is that we have built a world-spanning network of communication and computation to test this assertion. While it occasionally engenders entirely new forms of behaviour and interaction, the network most often shows to us with startling clarity the relationships and tendencies which have been latent or occluded until now. In the face of the increased standardisation of knowledge, it becomes harder and harder to argue against quantified thinking, because the advances of technology have been conjoined with the scientific method and social progress. But as I hope to show, technology ultimately reveals its limitations….

“Eroom’s law” – Moore’s law backwards – was recently formulated to describe a problem in pharmacology. Drug discovery has been getting more expensive. Since the 1950s the number of drugs approved for use in human patients per billion US dollars spent on research and development has halved every nine years. This problem has long perplexed researchers. According to the principles of technological growth, the trend should be in the opposite direction. In a 2012 paper in Nature entitled “Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency” the authors propose and investigate several possible causes for this. They begin with social and physical influences, such as increased regulation, increased expectations and the exhaustion of easy targets (the “low hanging fruit” problem). Each of these are – with qualifications – disposed of, leaving open the question of the discovery process itself….(More)

The crowdsourcing movement to improve African maps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Stein for Quartz: “In map after map after map, many African countries appear as a void, marked with a color that signifies not a percentage or a policy but merely offers an explanation: “no data available.”

Where numbers or cartography has left African countries behind, developers are stepping in with open-source tools that allow anyone from academics to your everyday smartphone user to improve maps of the continent.

One such project is Missing Maps, which invites people to use satellite imagery on mapping platform OpenStreetMap to fill out roads, buildings and other features in various parts of Africa that lack these markers. Active projects on åMissing Maps include everything from mapping houses in Malawi to marking roads in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Missing Maps co-founder Ivan Gayton said humanitarian organizations could use the refined maps for development projects or to respond to future disasters or disease outbreaks….

In July, Missing Maps launched MapSwipe, a smartphone app that helps whittle down the areas needed for mapping on OpenStreetMap by giving anyone with an iPhone or Android phone the ability to swipe through satellite images and indicate if they contain features like houses, roads or paths. These are then forwarded onto Missing Maps for precise marking of these features….Missing Maps’s approach is similar to that of Mapping Africa, a project developed at Princeton University that pays users to look at satellite images and identify croplands….People who sign up on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service are given satellite images of random patches of land across Africa and asked to determine if the land is being used for farming.

…One outlet for Mapping Africa’s data could be AfricaMap, a Harvard University project where users can compile data on everything from ethnic groups to mother tongues to slave trade routes and layer it over a map of the continent….(More)”

Even in Era of Disillusionment, Many Around the World Say Ordinary Citizens Can Influence Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Survey by Pew Global: “Signs of political discontent are increasingly common in many Western nations, with anti-establishment parties and candidates drawing significant attention and support across the European Union and in the United States. Meanwhile, as previous Pew Research Center surveys have shown, in emerging and developing economies there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way the political system is working.

As a new nine-country Pew Research Center survey on the strengths and limitations of civic engagement illustrates, there is a common perception that government is run for the benefit of the few, rather than the many in both emerging democracies and more mature democracies that have faced economic challenges in recent years. In eight of nine nations surveyed, more than half say government is run for the benefit of only a few groups in society, not for all people.1

However, this skeptical outlook on government does not mean people have given up on democracy or the ability of average citizens to have an impact on how the country is run. Roughly half or more in eight nations – Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the U.S., India, Greece, Italy and Poland – say ordinary citizens can have a lot of influence on government. Hungary, where 61% say there is little citizens can do, is the lone nation where pessimism clearly outweighs optimism on this front.

Many people in these nine nations say they could potentially be motivated to become politically engaged on a variety of issues, especially poor health care, poverty and poor-quality schools. When asked what types of issues could get them to take political action, such as contacting an elected official or taking part in a protest, poor health care is the top choice among the six issues tested in six of eight countries. Health care, poverty and education constitute the top three motivators in all nations except India and Poland….(More)

The case against democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in the New Yorker: “Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals. Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one, called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until 1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement had discredited them.

Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. …In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside out to create an uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting might be just what poor blacks need.”…(More)”

Tackling Corruption with People-Powered Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sandra Prüfer at Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth: “Informal fees plague India’s “free” maternal health services. In Nigeria, village households don’t receive the clean cookstoves their government paid for. Around the world, corruption – coupled with the inability to find and share information about it – stymies development in low-income communities.

Now, digital transparency platforms – supplemented with features illiterate and rural populations can use – make it possible for traditionally excluded groups to make their voices heard and access tools they need to grow.

Mapping Corruption Hot Spots in India

One of the problems surrounding access to information is the lack of reliable information in the first place: a popular method to create knowledge is crowdsourcing and enlisting the public to monitor and report on certain issues.

The Mera Swasthya Meri Aawaz platform, which means “Our Health, Our Voice”, is an interactive map in Uttar Pradesh launched by the Indian non-profit organization SAHAYOG. It enables women to anonymously report illicit fees charged for services at maternal health clinics using their mobile phones.

To reduce infant mortality and deaths in childbirth, the Indian government provides free prenatal care and cash incentives to use maternal health clinics, but many charge illegal fees anyway – cutting mothers off from lifesaving healthcare and inhibiting communities’ growth. An estimated 45,000 women in India died in 2015 from complications of pregnancy and childbirth – one of the highest rates of any country in the world; low-income women are disproportionately affected….“Documenting illegal payment demands in real time and aggregating the data online increased governmental willingness to listen,” Sandhya says. “Because the data is linked to technology, its authenticity is not questioned.”

Following the Money in Nigeria

In Nigeria, Connected Development (CODE) also champions open data to combat corruption in infrastructure building, health and education projects. Its mission is to improve access to information and empower local communities to share data that can expose financial irregularities. Since 2012, the Abuja-based watchdog group has investigated twelve capital projects, successfully pressuring the government to release funds including $5.3 million to treat 1,500 lead-poisoned children.

“People activate us: if they know about any project that is supposed to be in their community, but isn’t, they tell us they want us to follow the money – and we’ll take it from there,” says CODE co-founder Oludotun Babayemi.

Users alert the watchdog group directly through its webpage, which publishes open-source data about development projects that are supposed to be happening, based on reports from freedom of information requests to Nigeria’s federal minister of environment, World Bank data and government press releases.

Last year, as part of their #WomenCookstoves reporting campaign, CODE revealed an apparent scam by tracking a $49.8 million government project that was supposed to purchase 750,000 clean cookstoves for rural women. Smoke inhalation diseases disproportionately affect women who spend time cooking over wood fires; according to the World Health Organization, almost 100,000 people die yearly in Nigeria from inhaling wood smoke, the country’s third biggest killer after malaria and AIDS.

“After three months, we found out that only 15 percent of the $48 million was given to the contractor – meaning there were only 45,000 cook stoves out of 750,000 in the county,” Babayemi says….(More)”

Obama Brought Silicon Valley to Washington

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jenna Wortham at The New York Times: “…“Fixing” problems with technology often just creates more problems, largely because technology is never developed in a neutral way: It embodies the values and biases of the people who create it. Crime-predicting software, celebrated when it was introduced in police departments around the country, turned out to reinforce discriminatory policing. Facebook was recently accused of suppressing conservative news from its trending topics. (The company denied a bias, but announced plans to train employees to neutralize political, racial, gender and age biases that could influence what it shows its user base.) Several studies have found that Airbnb has worsened the housing crises in some cities where it operates. In January, a report from the World Bank declared that tech companies were widening income inequality and wealth disparities, not improving them….

None of this was mentioned at South by South Lawn. Instead, speakers heralded the power of the tech community. John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader, gave a rousing talk that implored listeners to “get in trouble. Good trouble. Get in the way and make some noise.” Clay Dumas, chief of staff for the Office of Digital Strategy at the White House, told me in an email that the event could be considered part of a legacy to inspire social change and activism through technology. “In his final months in office,” he wrote, “President Obama wants to empower the generation of people that helped launch his candidacy and whose efforts carried him into office.”

…But a few days later, during a speech at Carnegie Mellon, Obama seemed to reckon with his feelings about the potential — and limits — of the tech world. The White House can’t be as freewheeling as a start-up, he said, because “by definition, democracy is messy. And part of government’s job is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.” But he added that he didn’t want people to become “discouraged and say, ‘I’m just not going to deal with government.’ ” Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could. That lesson was apparent on the lawn. While I still don’t believe that technology is a panacea for society’s problems, I will always appreciate the first president who tried to bring what’s best about Silicon Valley to Washington, even if some of the bad came with it….(More)”

Crowdsourcing campaign rectifies translation errors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “A few months ago, Seoul City launched a month long campaign during September and October asking people to help correct poorly translated street signs. For examples, the sign pictured below has incorrectly abbreviated “Bridge,” which should be corrected to “Brg.” Those who find mistakes can submit them via email, including a picture of the sign and location details. The initiative is targeting signs in English, Chinese and Japanese in public places such as subway stations, bus stops and tourist information sites. Seoul city is offering prizes to those who successfully spot mistakes. Top spotters receive a rewards of KRW 200,000 (around USD 180).

450bridgeerror

The scheme comes as part of a drive to improve the experience of tourists travelling to the South Korean capital. According to a Seoul city official, “Multilingual signs are important standards to assess a country’s competitiveness in the tourism business. We want to make sure that foreigners in Seoul suffer no inconvenience.”…(More)”