I am leading a project called Demographic Data for Development at the Population Council. My colleagues and I are working with partners in Ghana, Senegal, and Namibia on several initiatives designed to increase data access and use among journalists. We need someone with a lot of energy and ideas to join the NYC-based team.
You should consider applying if any or all of the following describe you:
(1) You are a journalist with experience writing about health and development issues.
(2) You are crazy about Open Data and have the World Bank data app installed on your iPhone (iPhone not required). A burning passion to win the Apps for Development contest would not hurt either.
(3) You spend your free time tinkering with open source projects.
(4) You are a master at curriculum development and are excited to help African journalists learn more about how to use development data in their reporting.
There are a few core project management tasks that will be required, but the position will be shaped to fit the successful candidate.
Last week my Google Reader account was bombarded by posts about a guy named Jason, his idea to help the “people of Africa” with donated t-shirts and a steady stream of corresponding outrage from aid professionals and observers. Here is the go-to link for all things shirt-gate.
Here is my 140-character summary:
No shirts in Africa? Idea: Send 1M tees. Instant web of rejection. Anti-hatorade video reply posted. Roundtable convened. Rethink.
What did I learn from this back-and-forth? First, many Africans do already have shirts (thanks, blogosphere!). Second, in-kind donations of items like shirts and shoes from far away lands do not make for good humanitarian aid. We were reminded of this after the earthquake in Haiti.
A weekend re-branding suggests that the folks at 1millionshirts.org may have learned a few things as well. Most significantly, the site no longer refers to the “people of Africa.” The goal, however, is still 1 million shirts raised. Why 1 million shirts? Jason and colleagues admit that the answer is not clear yet, but commit to use T-shirts “as the vehicle to help sustainable efforts in specific areas that the charities we choose to work with are involved in.”
In their defense, you don’t have too many options after you pay $1.99 for the domain name 1millionshirts.org, right?
There is a big push these days to open up information. Open Government. Open Data. Open Access. Open Source. And now, open global health and development.
In January 2010, PLoS Medicine, a peer-reviewed open-access journal, published a commitment from eight major global health agencies to improve health data throughout its life cycle — from collection to access to use. Now, the World Bank is keeping its promise to improve access to data.
On Tuesday, the Bank launched www.data.worldbank.org, a new platform for sharing global health and development data. For the first time, data lovers worldwide have free access to a robust Data Catalog of more than 2,000 indicators from various sources. The interface is clean and easy to use. There is even an API (Application Programming Interface) for developers! This means that people will be able to extend this great service in ways the World Bank may not have envisioned.
That is the way to share.
Increasing access to raw data will change the way we learn about the world. But don’t take it from me. I did not invent the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee did. Go ahead and check out the clip below. Inspired? Good. Now here are a few key resources for global health and development data:
Interactive Short Paper Session: Geographic Contexts of Global Health
Abstract
Characteristics of the social and physical environment — the social ecology — can positively or negatively influence the health and well-being of adolescents, including their ability to avoid contracting HIV and other diseases. This environmental/structural view suggests that risk for disease cannot be solely explained by characteristics of individuals, such as knowledge of HIV transmission or attitudes towards risky sexual behavior. The broader social ecology — from micro-level influences such as household resources, neighborhood disorder, and social networks to macro-level factors such as laws and policies — can restrict or enhance individual agency to avoid risk. Thus in developing prevention interventions, it is necessary to understand and address social-ecological factors that influence health in a particular context. This paper will examine the use participatory mapping and geospatial technologies to understand the context of disease and to inform the development of a setting-level HIV prevention intervention in Muhuru Bay, a small fishing village on the shore of Lake Victoria in western Kenya.
When the Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000, the urban slum population was 767 million. Today, it’s estimated that this figure has increased in absolute terms to 828 million in the last decade. My laptop calculator tells me this is 61 million additional slum dwellers.
In other news, the Millennium Development slum target has been achieved. Exceeded, actually, 10 years ahead of schedule.
Did I lose you with that one?
The United Nations Human Settlement Program, UN-HABITAT, released its newestState of the World’s Cities report at the fifth session of the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro in March, which I was fortunate to attend. This report contains an honest assessment of the progress in reducing the urban divide: the Millennium target was exceeded by at least 2.2 times, 10 years ahead of schedule. Yet existing efforts “are neither satisfactory nor adequate.” That’s honest, but it’s a little confusing. Going twice the distance in half the time is generally a good thing, right?
