Sub-Saharan Africa

Rethinking how we collect, share, and use development results data

Curated on December 16, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Development Gateway: “The international development community spends a great deal of time, effort, and money gathering data on thousands of indicators embedded in various levels of Results Frameworks. These data comprise outputs (school enrollment, immunization figures), program outcomes (educational attainment, disease prevalence), and, in some cases, impacts (changes in key outcomes over time).

Ostensibly, we use results data to allocate resources to the places, partners, and programs most likely to achieve lasting success. But is this data good enough – and is it used well enough – to genuinely increase development impact in priority areas?

Experience suggests that decision-makers at all levels may often face inadequate, incorrect, late, or incomplete results data. At the same time, a figurative “Tower of Babel” of both project-level M&E and program-level outcome data can make it difficult for agencies and organizations to share and use data effectively. Further, potential users may not have the skills, resources, or enabling environment to meaningfully analyze and apply results data to decisions. With these challenges in mind, the development community needs to re-think its investments in results data, making sure that the right users are able to collect, share, and use this information to maximum effect.

Our Initiative

To this end, Development Gateway (DG), with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to “diagnose” the results data ecosystem in three countries, identifying ways to improve data quality, sharing, and use in the health and agriculture sectors. Some of our important questions include:

Quality: Who collects data and how? Is data quality adequate? Does the data meet actual needs? How much time does data collection demand? How can data collection, quality, and reporting be improved?
Sharing: How can we compare results data from different donors, governments, and implementers? Is there demand for comparability? Should data be shared more freely? If so, how?
Use: How is results data analyzed and used to inform actual policies and plans? Does (or can) access to results data improve decision-making? Do the right people have the right data? How else can (or should) we promote data use?…(More)”

Introducing the Agricultural Open Data Package: BETA Version

Curated on December 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “GODAN, Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network, Open Data Charter, and the Open Data Institute are pleased to announce the release of the Agricultural Open Data Package: BETA version. …The Agriculture Open Data Package (http://AgPack.info) has been designed to help governments get to impact with open data in the agriculture sector. This practical resource provides key policy areas, key data categories, examples datasets, relevant interoperability initiatives, and use cases that policymakers and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector or open data should focus on, in order to address food security challenges.

The Package is meant as a source of inspiration and an invitation to start a national open data for agriculture initiative.

In the Package we identify fourteen key categories of data and discuss the effort it will take for a government to make this data available in a meaningful way. …

The Package also highlights more than ten use cases (the number is growing) demonstrating how open data is being harnessed to address sustainable agriculture and food security around the world. Examples include:

mapping water points to optimise scarce resource allocation in Burkina Faso
surfacing daily price information on multiple food commodities across India
benchmarking agricultural productivity in the Netherlands

Where relevant we also highlight applicable interoperability initiatives, such as open contracting, international aid transparency initiative (IATI), and global product classification (GPC) standards.

We recognise that the agriculture sector is diverse, with many contextual differences affecting scope of activities, priorities and capacities. In the full version of the Agricultural Open Data Package we discuss important implementation considerations such as inter-agency coordination and resourcing to develop an appropriate data infrastructure and a healthy data ‘ecosystem’ for agriculture….(More)”

Four steps to precision public health

Curated on December 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Scott F. Dowell, David Blazes & Susan Desmond-Hellmann at Nature: “When domestic transmission of Zika virus was confirmed in the United States in July 2016, the entire country was not declared at risk — nor even the entire state of Florida. Instead, precise surveillance defined two at-risk areas of Miami-Dade County, neighbourhoods measuring just 2.6 and 3.9 square kilometres. Travel advisories and mosquito control focused on those regions. Six weeks later, ongoing surveillance convinced officials to lift restrictions in one area and expand the other.

By contrast, a campaign against yellow fever launched this year in sub-Saharan Africa defines risk at the level of entire nations, often hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. More granular assessments have been deemed too complex.

The use of data to guide interventions that benefit populations more efficiently is a strategy we call precision public health. It requires robust primary surveillance data, rapid application of sophisticated analytics to track the geographical distribution of disease, and the capacity to act on such information¹.

The availability and use of precise data is becoming the norm in wealthy countries. But large swathes of the developing world are not reaping its advantages. In Guinea, it took months to assemble enough data to clearly identify the start of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. This should take days. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world; it is also where we know the least about causes of death…..

The value of precise disease tracking was baked into epidemiology from the start. In 1854, John Snow famously located cholera cases in London. His mapping of the spread of infection through contaminated water dealt a blow to the idea that the disease was caused by bad air. These days, people and pathogens move across the globe swiftly and in great numbers. In 2009, the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ influenza virus took just 35 days to spread from Mexico and the United States to China, South Korea and 12 other countries…

The public-health community is sharing more data faster; expectations are higher than ever that data will be available from clinical trials and from disease surveillance. In the past two years, the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust in London and the Gates Foundation have all instituted open data policies for their grant recipients, and leading journals have declared that sharing data during disease emergencies will not impede later publication.

Meanwhile, improved analysis, data visualization and machine learning have expanded our ability to use disparate data sources to decide what to do. A study published last year⁴ used precise geospatial modelling to infer that insecticide-treated bed nets were the single most influential intervention in the rapid decline of malaria.

However, in many parts of the developing world, there are still hurdles to the collection, analysis and use of more precise public-health data. Work towards malaria elimination in South Africa, for example, has depended largely on paper reporting forms, which are collected and entered manually each week by dozens of subdistricts, and eventually analysed at the province level. This process would be much faster if field workers filed reports from mobile phones.

Sources: Ref. 8/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

…Frontline workers should not find themselves frustrated by global programmes that fail to take into account data on local circumstances. Wherever they live — in a village, city or country, in the global south or north — people have the right to public-health decisions that are based on the best data and science possible, that minimize risk and cost, and maximize health in their communities…(More)”

Solving some of the world’s toughest problems with the Global Open Policy Report

Curated on December 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kelsey Wiens at Creative Commons: “Open Policy is when governments, institutions, and non-profits enact policies and legislation that makes content, knowledge, or data they produce or fund available under a permissive license to allow reuse, revision, remix, retention, and redistribution. This promotes innovation, access, and equity in areas of education, data, software, heritage, cultural content, science, and academia.

For several years, Creative Commons has been tracking the spread of open policies around the world. And now, with the new Global Open Policy Report (PDF) by the Open Policy Network, we’re able to provide a systematic overview of open policy development.

The first-of-its-kind report gives an overview of open policies in 38 countries, across four sectors: education, science, data and heritage. The report includes an Open Policy Index and regional impact and local case studies from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. The index measures open policy strength on two scales: policy strength and scope, and level of policy implementation. The index was developed by researchers from CommonSphere, a partner organization of CC Japan.

The Open Policy Index scores were used to classify countries as either Leading, Mid-Way, or Delayed in open policy development. The ten countries with the highest scores are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, France, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, Tanzania, and Uruguay…(More)

Open Government: The Global Context and the Way Forward

Curated on December 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the OECD: “…provides an in-depth, evidence-based analysis of open government initiatives and the challenges countries face in implementing and co-ordinating them. It also explores new trends in OECD member countries as well as a selection of countries from Latin America, MENA and South East Asia regions. Based on the 2015 Survey on Open Government and Citizen Participation in the Policy Cycle, the report identifies future areas of work, including the effort to mobilise and engage all branches and all levels of government in order to move from open governments to open states; how open government principles and practices can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals; the role of the Media to create an enabling environment for open government initiatives to thrive; and the growing importance of subnational institutions to implement successful open government reforms….(More)”

A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept

Curated on December 7, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “UNDP and UN Global Pulse today released a comprehensive guide on how to integrate new sources of data into development and humanitarian work.

New and emerging data sources such as mobile phone data, social media, remote sensors and satellites have the potential to improve the work of governments and development organizations across the globe.

Entitled ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept,’ this publication was developed by practitioners for practitioners. It provides step-by-step guidance for working with new sources of data to staff of UN agencies and international Non-Governmental Organizations.

The guide is a result of a collaboration of UNDP and UN Global Pulse with support from UN Volunteers. Led by UNDP innovation teams in Europe and Central Asia and Arab States, six UNDP offices in Armenia, Egypt, Kosovo[1], fYR Macedonia, Sudan and Tunisia each completed data innovation projects applicable to development challenges on the ground.

The publication builds on these successful case trials and on the expertise of data innovators from UNDP and UN Global Pulse who managed the design and development of those projects.

It provides practical guidance for jump-starting a data innovation project, from the design phase through the creation of a proof-of-concept.

The guide is structured into three sections – (I) Explore the Problem & System, (II) Assemble the Team and (III) Create the Workplan. Each of the sections comprises of a series of tools for completing the steps needed to initiate and design a data innovation project, to engage the right partners and to make sure that adequate privacy and protection mechanisms are applied.

…Download ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept’ here.”

Data Literacy – What is it and how can we make it happen?

Curated on December 1, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Mark Frank, Johanna Walker, Judie Attard, Alan Tygel of Special Issue on Data Literacy of The Journal of Community Informatics: “With the advent of the Internet and particularly Open Data, data literacy (the ability of non-specialists to make use of data) is rapidly becoming an essential life skill comparable to other types of literacy. However, it is still poorly defined and there is much to learn about how best to increase data literacy both amongst children and adults. This issue addresses both the definition of data literacy and current efforts on increasing and sustaining it. A feature of the issue is the range of contributors. While there are important contributions from the UK, Canada and other Western countries, these are complemented by several papers from the Global South where there is an emphasis on grounding data literacy in context and relating it the issues and concerns of communities. (Full Text: PDF)

Data can become Nigeria’s new ‘black gold’

Curated on November 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Labi Ogunbiyi in the Financial Times: “In the early 2000s I decided to leave my job heading the African project finance team in a global law firm to become an investor. My experience of managing big telecoms, infrastructure and energy transactions — and, regrettably, often disputes — involving governments, project sponsors, investors, big contractors, multilateral and development agencies had left me dissatisfied. Much of the ownership of the assets being fought over remained in the hands of international conglomerates. Africa’s lack of capacity to raise the capital to own them directly — and to develop the technical skills necessary for growth — was a clear weakness…

Yet, nearly 15 years after the domestic oil and gas sector began to evolve, oil is no longer the country’s only “black gold”. If I take a comparative look at how Nigeria’s energy sector has evolved since the early 2000’s, compared with how its ICT and broader technology industry has emerged, and the opportunities that both represent for the future, the contrast is stark. Nigeria, and the rest of the continent, has been enjoying a technology revolution and the opportunity that it represents has the potential to affect every sector of the economy. According to Africa Infotech Consulting, Nigeria’s mobile penetration rate — a measure of the number of devices by population — is more than 90 per cent, less than 20 years after the first mobile network appeared on the continent. Recent reports suggest more than 10 per cent of Nigerians have a smartphone. The availability and cost of fast data have improved dramatically….(More)”

The Journal of Interrupted Studies

Curated on November 27, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“…The Journal of Interrupted Studies is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the work of academics whose work has been interrupted by forced migration. Publishing both complete and incomplete articles the Journal is currently accepting submissions in the sciences and humanities….

By embracing a multidisciplinary approach the journal offers a platform for all academic endeavours thwarted by forced migration. Especially with regards to the ongoing crises in Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. We invite any and all students and academics who were interrupted in their studies and are now considered refugees to submit work.

Engaging in this process, we hope to create a conversation in which all participants can shape the discourse, on terms of dignity and mutual respect. We believe academia allows us to to to initiate such a dialogue and in the process create something of value for all parties.

Refugees status according to the European Union’s directive 2013/32/EU and 2013/33/EU is by no means a requirement for submitting to the Journal. We also wish to attract exiled academics who cannot return to their countries and universities without putting their lives at risk.

We believe that when academic voices are silenced by adversity it is not only the intellectual community that suffers…(More)

Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making

Curated on November 22, 2016October 23, 2018 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)”