In Startup@ARTPARK, the organization is providing incubation, acceleration, and mentorship for deep-tech startups at different stages of their growth journey. In Platforms@ARTPARK, foundational resources like data, open source models, data, and model pipelines are developed that enable research in Indian context and empower startups to create and scale their ventures through a multi-disciplinary approach. In Skilling@ARTPARK, the organization provides skills development programs that empower individuals and build capacity in the field.

It’s a tall order, providing that kind of full-service support, especially at a time of rapid development of new machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it became clear to the ARTPARK team that this approach is more essential than ever. This commitment to skilling and capacity building carries the potential to not only grow new companies but to advance meaningful social change. 

The Challenge 

ARTPARK began during the early days of the pandemic within the Indian Institute of Science campus. Many of the organization’s current team of 16 were working in some capacity on COVID-related issues. 

At the time, Dr. Bhaskar Rajakumar — now the ARTPARK Program Director of health initiatives — was working with the government of Karnataka, setting up the war room and data systems for the management of the disease for nearly two and a half years.

“Until COVID, my exposure to data science was limited,” he said. “The dependency on data-driven decisions in healthcare was minimal and, because of that, there was a bit of negligence in implementation of data systems.” 

Like many in healthcare and government, Rajakumar got a crash course in data science, and he quickly saw an opportunity for better data collection, better data quality, better systems for processing and analysis, and ultimately better health solutions. 

ARTPARK wanted to keep the momentum going.

“COVID gave all of us a lot of exposure to what is possible,”  said Rohit Satish, the director of health data initiatives. “We asked, ‘How can we sustain the interest in leveraging data science in public health?’ How can we take this forward? There was interest at government levels and in research and academia”

ARTPARK works across several areas, including advanced manufacturing and autonomous vehicles, robotics, and large language models. However, as COVID began to recede, the team saw how their early work in tracking the disease and conducting predictive modeling for future outbreaks could be applied in new ways. 

The Solution 

Progress came in the form of an expanded emphasis on health data and exploring the critical intersection of climate and health crisis, prompting ARTPARK to join as a host organization within data.org’s India Climate and Health Data Capacity Accelerator. 

“That is where dengue emerged as a priority disease,” said Rohit. 

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the incidence of dengue has grown dramatically around the world in recent decades, with reported cases increasing from 505,430 cases in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2019. A key driver of the increase in this mosquito-borne illness is climate change. Warmer global temperatures and increased precipitation have yielded ideal conditions for mosquitos. Globally, the economic burden of dengue is expected to be around $ 9 billion every year.

“This is an important problem and also a problem where proactive actions can control the outbreak,” Rohit explained. “There are some interventions that are possible with dengue, like source reduction activities, which are relatively low cost and can be informed by data science models.”

Building on the improved collection methods and data analytics and predictive modeling established during the pandemic, ARTPARK is applying those systems to dengue in close collaboration with leading experts from Indian Institute of Science, International Center for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), Bengaluru, and Northeastern University. Instead of relying on hard-copy paperwork, where frontline workers are identifying mosquito larvae breeding spots, they can now upload a photo that is tagged with geospatial data. Add in the public health data along with publicly-available topological and meteorological data, and the ability to identify risk for dengue–and subsequently deploy resources–is greatly enhanced. 

Best of all, Rohit  says, you can use that publicly available data to get a broad understanding of where outbreaks may occur, regardless of existing capacity. Areas with minimal reporting are often the communities with greatest risk.

“The model is as good as the data that it gets. If there are areas that do not traditionally have a robust data reporting structure, then the traditional models will miss that there may be outbreaks in those regions,” he said. “ Areas with robust reporting systems skew the data driven decision making and those without it, tend to get left out. Leveraging computational and AI-based techniques combined with advances in environmental surveillance, satellite-based technologies, especially in domains of climate and health, there is a great potential for context-specific and evidence-based interventions.”

With the experience of creating frameworks for improved monitoring and preparedness on dengue, ARTPARK is now looking at other issues at the intersection of climate and health, like tracking the incidence of additional vector-borne diseases like malaria, and exploring the correlation between heat waves and health conditions. 

They also hope to expand into other geographies, helping to inform public health policy and empowering frontline workers and patients at the individual level.

“I come from an engineering background, building products and building solutions,” Rohit said. “What matters most to me is impact. How many people does it affect? When we are talking about data science and public health, the scale of impact is very high.”

The Takeaway 

The scale of impact is high, yet the depth of expertise needed is broad. Both Rohit and Dr. Rajakumar underscored the interdisciplinary nature of their work. Workforce development is a key component of ARTPARK’s approach, and their focus on skilling extends beyond data scientists to students from public health and communications, among others.

Dr. Rajakumar said he’s a perfect example of why the field of data for social impact must broaden its network.

“I have been working as a healthcare professional for many years, and I always wondered why this knowledge was not part of my training,” he said. “This data helps me understand the disease better and it helps me understand the population better.”

Through its collaboration with JPAL curating and hosting one-year fellowship opportunities, as part of the the Capacity Accelerator Network, ARTPARK is committed to integrating data science into more educational and career pathways, including in medical training for healthcare professionals like Rajakumar.

“The next generation of leaders, the next generation of health practitioners who are coming into the field are interested in learning more about data-driven initiatives,” he said. “I’m happy that there has been more acceptance over time on the value of data-driven initiatives and, personally, I’m happy to see how data is helping solve big problems.”

The post ARTPARK Invests in People and Process to Improve Health Outcomes appeared first on data.org.

At the University of Chicago, this collaborative model comes alive. 

The University of Chicago Data Science Institute launched a summer program for data science in 2023 that has grown into one of the most robust and in-demand opportunities for young people interested in data science for social impact. The Data Science for Social Impact (DSSI) Summer Program–an epicenter of the US CAN Hub where students from eight participating institutions can apply–offers an immersive eight-week paid research experience. 

“We have to show our students that there is real work you can do and real change you can make in this field,” said Dr. David Uminsky, a senior research associate of computer science and executive director of UChicago’s Data Science Institute. “People come away with new networks and new relationships, and our hope is to set people on a really good career trajectory, as well.” 

In the course of one summer, students discover how data can advance their careers and partnering nonprofits access critical insights to drive change. 

The Challenge 

Each year, small teams of DSSI Summer Program participants are paired with mentors and assigned a project across a range of domains, from climate and energy policy to healthcare and human rights. Students work alongside a social impact organization in need of data science support.

For Isaiah Gonzalez, an undergraduate at California State University Fresno, his project in the summer of 2023 hit close to home. He is a California native and his grandfather worked at a pesticide plant for most of his career. 

For his family, it wasn’t an issue they closely considered–until Gonzalez began exploring the data. 

“It’s just so normalized here, but California lights up like a lightbulb when you put pesticide use data over the entirety of the state,” he said. 

California is home to less than 3 percent of the total cropland in the United States and yet represents 20 percent of the country’s pesticide use. This alarming trend and its impacts on public health in California–as well as the communities nationwide that consume food grown there–was a call to action for advocates in the Golden State. Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR) was founded more than 20 years ago and now includes more than 190 member organizations. 

The coalition aims to eliminate the use of the most harmful pesticides, reduce overall pesticide use, and promote more sustainable pest control solutions. The DSSI started collaborating with CPR through its partnership with the 11th Hour Project and a data visualization project led by the Open Spatial Lab. 

The Solution 

Gonzalez and his peers on his team, Shana McDowell (NC State), Folasade Fanegan (University of Chicago), and Grace Simunek (Harry S Truman College), along with mentors Dr. Amanda Kube Jotte and Sarah Walker, brought together datasets from California Pesticide Use Reports, US Census data, and the Surface Water Monitoring Database. They cleaned years of data and used township-range information to filter pesticide data by census tracts. 

From there, they did a spatial data deep dive to study clusters of pesticide use by geography and then cross-examined demographic impacts against race and ethnicity, median household income, and access to health insurance.

“It was very eye-opening to use my skills to present something that was happening in real life,” said Fanegan, a UChicago data science major with a minor in linguistics.

The result was a set of insights that CPR had suspected but not yet confirmed. Significant overlap exists between pesticide use and areas with higher Latinx populations, and a high proportion of pesticide illness cases are derived from exposure to off-site pesticide movement.

“Part of the value that a university adds to this conversation is this arms-length, rigorous, nonpartisan science,” Uminsky said. “Vetted and rigorous datasets and tools like this are going to give communities the ability to advocate for real policy change.”

According to Susan Paykin, associate director of Community Centered Data Science at the Institute, it also helped Californians for Pesticide Reform consider ways to engage the next generation of advocates that will take this fight forward.

“They were not only excited to hear about some of the insights and findings at the end of the summer, but they were excited and proud that students were engaging in this work and learning about their organization,” she said. “Seeing how their work and specifically this data can be a springboard to engage students was a takeaway for the organization.”

The Takeaway 

The data science and analysis coming out of the DSSI Summer Program makes a difference for social impact partners like CPR. The partnership between the nonprofit and the CAN hub continues, and they hope to launch a new visualization and policy tool at the end of summer 2024. These partnerships have also informed a broader body of work, with the US CAN partners creating “Data Science for Social Impact in Higher Education: First Steps,” a playbook for how to expand opportunities for social impact data science learning.

“We think we can build a sustainable, long-term program here and also study the model so it’s replicable at other institutions and local consortiums,” Uminsky said.

Beyond these tools, what excites him the most are the implications for students and their futures.

“I’m really thrilled to see where this goes. I feel like some of my biggest impact can be to shape future students and give them these opportunities,” he said, recalling his own academic journey and a rigorous experiential learning experience that informed his future career path. 

For Gonzalez, last summer offered a similarly formative experience.

“I feel like an infinitely better student having gone through the program. It was one of the best things, educationally, that I’ve ever done,” he said. “It is because of this program and because of all the mentor support at the University of Chicago that I have decided to pursue a Master’s degree.”

Fanegan, too, cites the level of support, mentorship, and networking as a key element of the program. 

“From this experience, I learned to ask for help and be deliberate in doing that,” she said. “We had so much support from the mentors and the professors here. They really helped us create the project and make a difference.”

The DSSI Summer Program receives hundreds of applications from talented students like Gonzalez and Fanegan for fewer than two dozen spaces, and the demand continues to grow. In the summer of 2024, a new cohort of students will continue the program’s legacy of tackling real-world problems, this time with a focus on natural language processing. 

“It doesn’t just reflect the program maturing,” said Paykin. “It reflects the broader interest growing on campuses where this work is taking place.”

The post Data Science for Social Impact (DSSI) Students Advance Environmental Advocacy While Building Purpose-Driven Careers appeared first on data.org.

Like thousands of his fellow Nigerians, Umeh–a public health physician–has experienced recurrent displacement because of the country’s increasing incidence of torrential flooding. Families are driven out of their homes and businesses, returning when the water recedes to severely damaged or even destroyed properties. Among the wreckage are healthcare centers, removing a critical community access point of quality health care.

At the same time that the climate crisis is creating more significant, prolonged, and frequent flood events, the COVID-19 pandemic further widened gaps in healthcare access in the country. 

Umeh is one man, one doctor. He couldn’t solve the problem alone. But as the executive director of Parkers Mobile Clinic, he’s bringing hope—and health—to Nigeria’s most flood-prone regions. 

The Challenge 

According to the United Nations, flooding is the most common and recurring disaster in Nigeria, including a devastating flood in 2022 that affected 34 out of the country’s 36 states and displaced 1.3 million people. At the time, UNICEF issued an urgent call to action, pointing to more than 2.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance—60 percent of whom were children. 

In these flood-prone communities, loss of life and property is a constant threat. So, too, are the longer-term impacts. The risks of waterborne disease and malnutrition are high in Nigeria, as evidenced by the thousands of cases of cholera in the wake of the 2022 flood. 

“We don’t need anyone to tell us that climate change is real,” Umeh says. “This keeps on happening in Nigeria. Climate change issues ultimately affect the quality of life of people, and it affects their ability to access health care, education, and work.”

Services like health care, education, and employment are absolutely critical, yet Nigerians are often left without a lifeline. Schools and health care centers are destroyed or abandoned, teachers and physicians are likewise displaced, and job opportunities are scarce. 

Subsequent disaster aid to the country barely scratches the surface of what is needed.

“Another of the many consequences of these flood-prone areas is that private sectors don’t invest in these communities,” Umeh said. 

The Solution 

If people can’t access support, Umeh realized he needed to bring support to the people.

He started Parkers Mobile Clinic in 2019, with an initial focus on nutrition and family planning. Resources and supplies—including vitamins, nutritional supplements, and medication for treating parasites–were distributed through community health workers traveling to camps and flood-prone areas in partnership with state ministries of health. In the wake of the pandemic and even more drastic flooding, however, Umeh’s focus shifted and access to health care became the central problem that Parkers Mobile Clinic seeks to solve.

“There is a very high disparity in health care access here,” he said. “Our mission is to strengthen health care solutions for people living in these flood-prone regions. We want to use technology to strengthen access to care.”

The clinic spun out a new initiative, Parkers Resilient Health (PRH), which similarly relies on community health workers to increase awareness and adoption. Through training and mobilizing local residents who speak the language and understand the local context, Umeh says there is a stronger sense of trust from end-users. And now, these community health workers are armed with a resource that Nigerians can access on their own time. 

Parkers Resilient Health offers a telemedicine service available via a website or WhatsApp, where users can connect with, be virtually evaluated by, and receive medical guidance from a vast network of doctors and medical professionals.

Telehealth can be delivered directly to users or, particularly exciting to Umeh, the network can be leveraged to further support and empower community health workers. Data from this telemedicine service provides insights into areas of greatest need.

“We want to strengthen capacity building through different models, including virtual training and clinical mentorship so our community health workers can utilize the platform and have access to doctors at any time,” he said. “This clinical mentorship allows community health care workers to develop their skills and knowledge, leading to healthier communities.”

In the future, Umeh hopes to deploy advanced mobile clinics equipped with a more comprehensive range of medical capabilities and medications, with supervision provided by physicians through a built-in telemedicine workstation.

The Takeaway 

To date, Parkers Resilient Health’s telemedicine tools and community health outreach model have directly reached more than 15,000 Nigerians, enabling people to better monitor health risks, learn about available resources, and access interventions as needed. 

Expanding that reach will require more resources, so Umeh continues to track data to build his case and to better understand local trends in health. In 2023, the Parkers Resilient Health project received an award in the UN Development Programme’s Youth4Climate call for solutions.

Umeh is eager to continue telling the story of Parkers Resilient Health and of his region in Nigeria, where people suffer from the devastating effects of climate change.

“Most times they don’t even contribute to the issue, yet they don’t have enough resources to adapt to climate change challenges when they come,” he said. “But what I’m most proud of is that each day we work to improve the health of people, especially women and children. We are enabling them to have a better quality of life.”

The post Parkers Mobile Clinic Uses Telemedicine to Increase Access to Health Care appeared first on data.org.

In their wake, less densely populated areas and communities are struggling under the weight of fewer opportunities and a lack of young people to carry the areas forward.

Meaningful solutions exist to support underserved areas, reduce inequality, and direct public resources more effectively and equitably, but not without a deeper understanding of the local context. At Aalborg University, a small team of researchers is having an outsized impact with an interactive website where policymakers, urban planners, and other decision-makers can explore key indicators—and levers of change—related to economic prosperity.

The Challenge 

Denmark has a considerable amount of administrative data, much of which is already publicly available through Statistics Denmark. Still, much of the information is not accessible at the fine-grained level that is needed to understand local demographic trends and counteract challenges. Raw data downloads, for example, are only useful for stakeholders with high data literacy and enough time and capacity to conduct their own analysis.

Unlike countries like the United States, where census tracts provide insight into trends in specific areas over time, Denmark is divided into 98 divisions, or municipalities, that are quite large, geographically and do not align with postal codes, which are subject to change. As a result, data from these 98 divisions is unreliable as a useful marker of local challenges and contradictions at the neighborhood level.

Dr. Elise Stenholt Lange, a self-proclaimed “data nerd” and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg, knew that there was a better way. She wanted more data, more granularity, and more actionable information to drive change.

“We lack a very detailed geographical scale to study cities and study neighborhoods,” she said. “I was drawn to this idea where you could democratize data and communicate data in a more accessible language. I want my work and other peoples’ work to be used in society.”

So, a small, determined group within the department set out to create a tool that could make data on economic inequality and prosperity accessible to all—and change the policymaking landscape in Denmark in the process. 

The Solution 

Born from Stenholt Lange’s vision and supported by the university, the BUILD team applied for data.org’s Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, a global initiative to invest in breakthrough ideas thanks to funding and support from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and The Rockefeller Foundation. BUILD was selected as one of nine awarded projects around the world as they set out to test their theory for more inclusive data systems.

Developed during the pandemic, “Mapping the Regional Quality of Life” had to begin with better data. 

“Planners need better access to data and more fine grain data so they can study their specific community at a more local level. The access to that data is really challenging and unequally distributed. It renders some communities invisible, so I’m very interested in democratizing data,” said Dr. Malene Rudolf Lindberg, a fellow postdoctoral researcher with a background in sociology and urban planning and the other half of BUILD’s current two-person operation.

“Planners need better access to data and more fine grain data so they can study their specific community at a more local level. The access to that data is really challenging and unequally distributed. It renders some communities invisible, so I’m very interested in democratizing data,” said Dr. Malene Rudolf Lindberg, a fellow postdoctoral researcher with a background in sociology and urban planning and the other half of BUILD’s current two-person operation.

How to begin that process was something that kept the team up at night. In academia, researchers are often working on projects well within their established area of expertise. For Stenholt Lange, the creation of new, consistent residential areas was beyond her skill set. 

“Sometimes you need to take on a challenge and push boundaries. You need the courage to possibly not succeed,” she said. “You need to have dreams about something that is beyond your own capability and then try to find the people who can help solve it for you.”

Those problem-solvers came from the data.org network. As part of the Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, BUILD connected with Data Clinic – Two Sigma. Together, they were able to develop an algorithm for creating new, more localized residential areas. Population data was then organized and aggregated on core socio-economic indicators, including housing prices, education levels, wage levels, access to education, migration rate, and labor market status. 

All that information is now publicly available. Users can compare the development, growth, and challenges of geographic areas over a 30-year period, better understanding the data through interactive maps and graphs that illustrate key highlights.

At BUILD’s launch event, the room was overflowing.

“A turning point for me has been some of the interactions with local community representatives or local planners, saying ‘wow, this is really what we need. Is this really for us to use, for free?’ Rudolf Lindberg said. “That has been reassuring.”

The answer to that last question is yes; the tool is free. All data collected and analyzed by BUILD is open source.

In the City of Vejle, policymakers used socio-economic data on neighborhoods to push back on a piece of legislation called the Parallel Society Act, which sought to demolish low-income properties to increase “social mix.” The effort was successful, and a less drastic intervention emerged. In another instance, an associate professor from the University of Copenhagen is using The Danish Neighborhood Atlas in his course on regional and urban development. 

The Takeaway 

The biggest surprise of BUILD has been not in the data but in the people: both the unexpected users and the capacity of the intended audience.

On the former, both researchers said they were surprised at the launch event how many private companies, consultants, developers, and even insurance companies were present and interested in the tools.

Yet when it comes to BUILD’s priority audiences, they have found that the capacity to analyze and apply the data is hugely variable depending on the municipality or stakeholder, and public entities struggle to compete for top talent with private companies offering better pay. Universities, for example, often operate on short-term contracts, leading to turnover that exacerbates the challenges in recruitment and retention. 

Understanding use cases and building that capacity to use the data for social good is the focus of the next few years, along with refining the datasets and applying their learnings and approaches to other countries. 

“We are very interested in doing more research into data implementation and data use in urban planning processes,” Rudolf Lindberg said. “It’s clear that there are so many inequalities here, both regarding the access, the skill levels, how it’s used in the political process, so that could be very interesting to study.”

As these partnerships develop, Stenholt Lange hopes more audiences will use and value the tool, and more young professionals will consider careers that advance the work.

“It’s nice to have a job you feel is meaningful,” she said. “I have this fire in me and I want to work with other people where you can have this ping pong, back and forth. In this field, you can continue developing your own skill set, developing new methods, learning new things.”

The post Researchers Map Quality of Life Indicators with Geographic Migration Trends appeared first on data.org.

As the Tar Heel State’s land-grant university, North Carolina State University serves as a bridge between rural communities and the solutions they need. 

Launched in 2018, Rural Works! offers a hands-on internship experience to students who work with rural employers. The program has grown from 19 interns in its first year to 137 in the summer of 2023, with an increasing focus on data for social impact.

The Challenge 

Rural Works! was initially developed as a workforce development program serving rural communities—both the employers located in rural areas, where competition for talent is fierce, and the students coming from rural areas who may not have the same exposure to career advancement opportunities.

Students have access to a paid summer internship, a robust orientation and training process, and career coaching. Participating employers gain access to a pool of talented NC State students, increased capacity, and the ability to test out prospective hires or even new positions before bringing them online. Students may come to the program with an internship already identified or can meet with program leaders to identify areas of interest before applying for program entry and funding. 

That worked well for the first few years. But as the demand continued to grow from both sides of the program and staff developed a deeper understanding of what private, public, and nonprofit organizations in rural counties needed, it became clear that access to talent wasn’t the only challenge that Rural Works! could help solve. 

These organizations—many of them small and understaffed—had little to no data infrastructure and limited capacity for expanding their use of data to identify solutions, implement changes, and drive progress. 

The Solution 

In 2020, Rural Works! received a grant from the State Employees Credit Union Bank and implemented a summer internship called the SECU Public Fellows Internship Program. Building on the success of their early internship placements, the program engaged the university’s Data Science Academy to enrich the professional development experience for students and add a new layer of problem-solving for employers.

Now, in addition to the typical onboarding and training processes for interns, participating students take a data science tutorial through the Data Science Academy and are paired with one of its graduate assistants. The graduate students and their faculty advisor, Hangjie Ji, were supported by a grant from data.org.

“The Data Science Academy is delighted to partner with Career Development Center and SECU to build data science capacity across North Carolina,” said Dr. Rachel Levy, executive director of the Data Science Academy and professor of mathematics.  “The program aligns perfectly with our goal to bring new data science expertise to all 100 NC counties.

Oftentimes, this is the student’s first exposure to data science.

“That lack of experience is really what made this a valuable professional development opportunity for them. Data science is for everyone,” said Sam Sanger, the university’s rural outreach coordinator, adding that it is a first for many of the employers, as well. “Most of the employers are grateful because in nonprofits and government organizations, people are stretched thin, so these projects are things that they wouldn’t have had time for otherwise.”

Data projects are designed locally, with interns working side by side with employers to understand where and how data could be most useful to their operation. Together, they identify project goals and potential obstacles, and then interns work with the more experienced graduate assistants to develop a project.

Through this process, Dr. Hangjie Ji, an assistant professor of mathematics at NC State, has seen new possibilities take shape. One student who went through the one-credit data internship course was able to craft a more data science-intensive Rural Works internship the following summer, some have expanded beyond the original scope of their projects, and others have expressed an interest in deeper data science learning, seeking out opportunities to learn coding in languages like Python.

“For most students, it’s about exposing them to the world of data science—it’s not a scary world,” she said. 

Sanger shared the story of a political science major who interned with a Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter and used her data science project to evaluate the organization’s tax and purchasing data. By going through past receipts, she ended up saving them $10,000 in the first year and identified ongoing savings to the tune of $3,000 a year.

Varun Deepak Gudhe is one of the graduate assistants working with the interns. He can tick off a long list of projects and their benefits for both student and employer: a timeline of disability legislation and its impact on fundraising for an inclusion organization; data visualization on monthly museum attendance and its correlation to events and marketing; and a student who had no formal data to pull from and instead traveled from farm to farm in a rural county to collect and later analyze data on crop changes, crop growth, and fertilization schedules.

“She offered real solutions for those farmers,” Deepak Gudhe said. “It shows that even in biology or agriculture, medical school—any field of study—data science can be integrated.” 

The Takeaway 

At the conclusion of the Rural Works! internship program, students give presentations to State Employees Credit Union Bank representatives, reinforcing the value of the funding.

“We’ve gotten fantastic reviews on how prepared our students are to give those presentations,” Sanger said. 

For other universities considering a similar offering, Ji warns that institutions must focus on building an inclusive approach to student engagement, removing barriers, and opening up new pathways to access data science education.

“In terms of the exposure to the concepts of data science early on, many programs have a lot of prerequisites in place. That may be a little intimidating or may delay the whole process of students getting involved,” she said. 

Levy adds that “this program has proven to be successful with no prerequisites, by setting reasonable expectations and providing mentoring and support. This aligns with the philosophy of the 1-credit courses offered by the Data Science Academy, many of which have no prerequisites and provide a gateway to data science for all NC State students.”

Once students do get involved, Sanger says the experience can be transformative. He hopes to engage more majors and colleges within NC State and further expand the program to meet the continuously growing demand.

“I would have loved to have been able to take a one-credit course or access this kind of opportunity when I was an undergrad because that would have prepared me so much for research projects in grad school. It would have prepared me for my job here,” he said. “That’s the direction that the workforce across industries is moving into. Everyone is going to need to, at a basic level, be able to engage with data science.”

The post Rural Works! Expands the Data Science Talent Pipeline in North Carolina appeared first on data.org.

Non-clinical individuals can under or over-report symptoms of illness for a variety of reasons or may be asymptomatic. The disconnect between private, state, and national data collection systems makes aggregation and analysis challenging. Often, once data is available, it’s too outdated to be actionable or presented such that an average person cannot comprehend it. Another challenge is that very few systems are working with an equity lens to focus on the needs of people down the socioeconomic and cultural hierarchy. How does a daily wage worker who cannot afford to miss work make decisions to protect their health during COVID-19?  That’s the question Precision Health Platform set out to answer, informed and accelerated by a global pandemic.

The Challenge 

In India, the World Health Organization has reported more than 45 million cases of COVID-19 since January 2020, resulting in 533,000 deaths. It became clear that the disease could take a toll on the country’s health and wellbeing. Like many countries worldwide, the government at the state and national levels had to deal with several challenges related to monitoring the outbreak and providing services to a vast and diverse population. 

“No one organization can solve this challenge single-handedly,” said Project and Communication Lead Sabhimanvi Dua. 

When COVID surged, the government was quick to focus on isolating and treating patients who were already symptomatic. However, wastewater can detect even asymptomatic cases. The organization began to monitor wastewater pathogens, developing the country’s first public health early warning platform for pandemic preparedness. 

Hungry for greater insights and better preparedness, other laboratories and academic institutes in India welcomed this approach and began to partner up for this initiative.

“Any information relevant to COVID-19 was essential for them because they were working in an emergency. The whole sense of urgency at that point in time made them very receptive,” said Shirish Harshe, senior technical lead at Precision Health Platform. “They took some of our early warning signals very seriously and developed action items based on that.”

The Solution 

Precision Health Platform first found a seat at the table in Bengaluru’s COVID war room, where their public health surveillance helped inform the city’s COVID response strategy.

Precision Health

“We can nudge the government in understanding the value of environmental surveillance and how it can be leveraged for public health,” said Prerak Shah, technology system and visualization lead. “Many of these things are becoming internalized within the public system.”

Shah helped create a public dashboard that synthesizes Precision Health’s findings and makes it easy for journalists, doctors, government leaders, and regular citizens to understand COVID-19 trends better while they’re happening. The dashboard uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to synchronize and display trends on a map. Insights are regularly shared through the platform’s social media as well.

“We’re getting the data from the communities, and we must give it back to them. We were able to take complicated epidemiological data and translate it into lucid insights and communication products,” said Dua, pointing in particular to the platform’s public data dashboard and Environmental Surveillance for COVID-19 – The Playbook. The playbook is an open-source, step-by-step guide on conducting citywide wastewater surveillance so that communities and organizations worldwide can learn from the platform’s experience. “Even five years from now, I know that the playbook will top the list of things I’m proud of.”

The team is cognizant, however, of not overstepping or sidestepping their public partners. They present the information as simply and objectively as possible and allow government leaders to serve as the public health spokespeople given their mandate. For Precision Health, it’s about data, science, communication, and equity.

“It is very easy to create panic and be portrayed as a fear-mongering organization, and we don’t want that,” Harshe said.

The team warned that it would also be easy to focus just on communities where data is accessible. 

Can India's drains help us prevent the next pandemic?

“In a resource-constrained environment, how do we ensure equitable access to information and resources? We are trying to ensure that the larger population in a city, including the marginalized and vulnerable, is being served, not just the well-off or affluent ones ,” said Shah.

In part, that has meant collecting wastewater samples from open sewer drains and relying on a growing network of more than 26 partners to monitor health symptoms being reported on the ground.

The Takeaway 

Growing that network will be essential as Precision Health moves beyond Bengaluru and the four other cities in which their team of 14 is currently operating: Lucknow, Jodhpur, Tiruchirappalli, and Thiruvananthapuram. When identifying new partners, they look for organizations that have partnerships with a lab and established relationships and credibility with the government and the community.

“We started in Bengaluru amidst the wave with all hands on deck, but when we scaled, we knew we couldn’t be everywhere. We believe that through orchestration, knowledge sharing, and technical support, our partners—civil society and community organizations—can help this work go further,” Dua said.

Precision Health wants to explore ways to localize public health surveillance information further and is already beginning to monitor and track other pathogens, including influenza and hepatitis. The system they built applies to other diseases with the potential to be expanded and tailored to the needs of different regions and countries depending on their unique public health patterns.  This expansion involves integrating climate change impacts on human health into their systems within the next few years.

“​​There is a very strong health implication from climatic events,” said Policy Catalyst, Asha Jyothi, who leads the intersectional work between climate and health. “Drought leads to greater heat strokes and malnutrition, for example. Climate change can even exacerbate diabetes or anemia and affects new and expecting mothers in physiological, emotional, and sociocultural ways. It’s all connected.” 

Ultimately, by tracking more pathogens, integrating more data, and serving more cities, Precision Health aims to help people become more resilient and proactive and live longer, healthier lives.

“For us, it will be a very long-term impact factor because we want to see communities gain resilience for health and how that translates into healthy days,” Harshe said. “We want to reduce unhealthy days over time.”

The post Precision Health Platform Improves Public Health Through Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance appeared first on data.org.

Ken Frantz was flipping through a copy of National Geographic in 2001 and an image stopped him in his tracks. Men dangling high in the air, using a rudimentary ropes system to dangerously cross a river—a broken bridge crumbling on either side of them and the Blue Nile in Ethiopia rushing below.  

As the owner of a construction company, Frantz knew that the problem was solvable. 

It took Frantz and his team just three months to get that bridge rebuilt. Now, more than 20 years and nearly 500 bridges later, that mindset—seeing big challenges like rural isolation and poverty as solvable—fuels a new data-driven chapter for Bridges to Prosperity (B2P), a nonprofit that aims to meet an estimated global demand for 100,000 bridges serving 250 million people—one bridge at a time.

The Challenge 

Rural isolation is a root cause of poverty.  

Access to nutritious food, education, and health care—powerful social determinants of health—all depend on sufficient transportation infrastructure to get to markets, schools, and hospitals. Without access to these critical resources, health and economic equity gaps widen. People risk their lives to travel unsafe routes or go without altogether.  

Globally, B2P’s monitoring and evaluation program has identified an estimated 1.3 million people who do not have safe access to these resources, threatening their lives and livelihoods. Yet Abbie Noriega, the Chief Impact Officer for B2P, says so many people—even those working in global development and government—are unaware of the scope of the issue. 

One reason the problem is not more well known is a lack of reliable data. 

“For the most part, it just doesn’t exist,” Noriega said. “No governments in the world understand and have documented well the infrastructure gap in the rural context. We are missing data as simple as rivers and roads for a huge portion of the world.” 

The data may not yet exist, but the case for impact is strong.  

“We construct tangible bridges. When I present a picture on my phone and say, ‘Here is the bridge,’ and I see the realization dawn on people’s faces ” said Global Advocacy and Partnerships Director Eniola Mafe-Abaga. “In an era obsessed with groundbreaking innovations and complex ‘blockchain/data/disruptive technologies,’ our work stands out as a straightforward, evidence-backed solution with the power to transform lives.”

The Solution 

Twenty-plus years ago, Ken Frantz saw a simple problem with a simple solution. So, he rallied his network, and they built a bridge. And then another, and then another.  

B2P today has trail bridges in 21 countries.  

For the organization’s first decade, the team focused on mastering the technical challenges associated with securing materials and labor and transporting them safely in some of the most remote, and often geographically challenging, environments in the world. They are now masters at their craft, and it typically takes just eight weeks to construct a bridge. 

With the practical execution perfected, B2P’s focus has increasingly shifted to maximizing cost efficiency and durability, building greater trust with governments and community partners, and—now, more than ever—building bridges that are sustainable and climate resilient. 

Equally important is advocacy.  

“Redirecting even one percent of global infrastructure spending toward trail bridges could be transformatives, would be transformative,” Mafe-Abaga said. “The evidence for their impact is robust. Our current focus is on disseminating this knowledge to those who can implement these projects broadly. The ultimate goal is for governments to be resourced, willing, and able to sustainably construct these bridges for their communities.” 

Building that kind of widespread public will and demand requires better data, an area in which B2P has experienced significant growth since its early days.  

Before B2P sets out to build a new bridge, prospective locations are identified through robust needs assessments. B2P connects with national governments to begin to build support and gain permission. Then they train local needs assessors to conduct social and technical assessments and convene public meetings and focus groups.

Working closely with the community, these assessors compile as much data as possible, from the disparity in heights between banks to the number of past mortalities on site. Catchment surveys help them understand how people are using crossings, both before and after a new bridge has been constructed. 

“It’s a much more community-driven, locally-driven process. You can never replace local knowledge,” Noriega said.  

That information is added to a centralized, growing database of global information that includes coordinates, photographs, and information on a massive network of partners on the ground. B2P sees significant opportunities ahead for how geo-mapping technologies and AI can accelerate their work and are in the beta testing phase of Fika Map, a suite of remote analysis tools that use machine learning to locate where access is most beneficial. 

The tool has the power to make B2P solutions more scalable and replicable than B2P’s founder could have ever imagined.  

In the meantime, they continue to solve major challenges for the communities they serve. According to B2P, easier access to health care leads to an 18 percent increase in care visits. There is a 30 percent increase in labor market income and a 75 percent increase in farm profits when people have year-round access to the local marketplaces. Twelve percent more children enroll when they can access school.  

B2P’s data also shows that social connection is the top reason that rural communities are crossing their bridges. 

“A connected community is a resilient community,” Noriega said. “It’s one of those things that makes life worth living.”

The Takeaway 

B2P is a bit of an outlier in the nonprofit field. They don’t fit neatly into the category of health care, education, climate, or gender, but the work they do influences all those dimensions of life.  

“This is one of the best investments you can make, dollar for dollar, in poverty alleviation,” Noriega said. 

Everyone at B2P has a personal story to tell about their experiences visiting one of their bridges. For Noriega, she was at a bridge site in Haiti when she noticed that everyone she saw crossing while carrying something—a child, cargo, an animal pulling a cart—was a woman. In Rwanda, Mafe-Abaga watched a young boy, maybe 3 years old, running across the bridge, and she was struck by the realization that the bridge would exist and serve his community for the entirety of his life.  

Caitlin McWhorter, the Director of Marketing and Communications, has been to three or four bridges in Ethiopia and returns home each time proud and excited to tell her daughters about the work she’s helping to advance. 

“Being able to talk to my kids about that makes me so proud,” she said. “Without these bridges, kids can’t go to school. Women can’t get to hospitals to have a baby. It’s a profound feeling, getting to see how this work—this simple intervention—is actually life-changing.” 

A simple intervention with an outsized impact and a goal that the B2P team believes is achievable if they continue to do what they do best, while using data to accelerate the adoption and replicability of trail bridges around the world.  

“There are so many complicated problems that are going to take centuries, millennia, to solve. The one we’re trying to solve is actually not one of them,” Noriega said. “It feels like a rare opportunity to say I’m working on something and I’ll probably see pretty massive global results in my lifetime if we do this right.” 

The post Bridges to Prosperity Makes Big Problems Solvable appeared first on data.org.

Ishango.ai bridges the gap between the demand for data skills and the availability of a robust workforce by leveraging the power of remote work, enabling international companies to tap into the talent pool in Africa without contributing to what’s referred to as the “brain drain” on the continent.

The Challenge

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, Eunice Baguma Ball and Naveed Ratansi talked about silver linings. Amid so much fear, uncertainty, and sadness, were there any bright spots? New opportunities? Ways to accelerate progress in the face of such immense challenges? 

Eunice had worked in the African tech ecosystem for over 12 years while Naveed had founded multiple education companies and had extensive commercial experience. Fascinated with the growth of remote working, they speculated how it could change work in Africa, which was experiencing significant emigration of highly skilled professionals to other countries, seeking better opportunities and improved living conditions. 

And that’s when it hit them. What if they could create jobs, foster local skills development, and reverse the brain drain in Africa by leveraging the new boom in remote work? 

“We see it firsthand all the time,” said Eunice Baguma Ball, Ishango.ai Co-Founder and Head of Operations. “Many of our friends have attained amazing degrees and qualifications but struggle to find opportunities, and the reality is that there are not enough jobs to accommodate the 10–12 million individuals entering the workforce each year.” 

Eunice and fellow Inshango.ai co-founders Naveed Ratansi and Oliver Angelil understood that one of the answers to bridging this gap could be remote working. With so many companies already working in a distributed manner around the globe, they set out to create incentives for professionals to stay and contribute to their home countries’ growth while meeting the needs of a high-demand market: data and technology. 

“We knew we could not only be leaders in this new space but that we could make an impact on so many young people who were committed to their communities but were faced with economic hardship if they stayed. It was a really exciting time,” said Ball. 

The Solution

Ishango.ai offers global companies the ability to access an untapped talent pool: African data scientists and data engineers. And those data scientists and engineers are put through a robust development program that includes a stipend, mentors from global institutions, and soft-skills training to take their careers to the next level.

“We knew we were going to face two significant challenges,” shared Ball. First, the company would need to change the narrative that outsourcing any degree of data talent must be pulled from countries outside of Africa. “We had to not only convince prospective clients that they could find high-skilled data talent as a service but also that the talent could come from Africa.”

Second, said Ball, was ensuring that the talent they were offering was not only highly skilled technically but that individuals had key soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, and cross-team management and collaboration — all crucial when working with multicultural and virtual teams. 

“How do you convince an Australian company that they can work with two data scientists in Ghana and that it will not only be cost-effective, it will actually result in greater outcomes?” said Courage Seyram Wemegah, Ishango.ai Program Manager. “When we first started out, we would show them the rigorous process of how we find and develop our talent. Now we use  case studies with data to illustrate how well our model works.”   

Ishango.ai recruits candidates through application open calls on its website and social media. Candidates are invited to take a coding assessment test and complete an interview with a senior team member. Successful candidates are then trained, matched with a company, and assigned a team and a senior data scientist as a mentor.

“Developing strong data scientist professionals extends beyond technical prowess,” said Wemegah. “Ishango.ai is looking for a combination of technical expertise alongside the ability to learn and adapt to different working environments. Our ongoing mentorship and training program smooths out any challenges around cultural fluency, soft skills, and most importantly, communication.”

Within the first eight weeks, the program prepares each participant to provide a presentation about their projects and key learnings for the company they’re working for. After this presentation, they could be offered a long-term contract.

Ethel Elikem Mensah, a participant in a recent Data Science Program cohort, said the training went far beyond soft and hard skills. “I developed a profound understanding of the impact data science can have in transforming businesses and driving social change,” she noted. “It transformed my career and my perspective on the power of data science.”

The Takeaway

Today, Ishango.ai data scientists have delivered projects across sectors such as finance, e-commerce, healthcare, agriculture, and industrial engineering for companies from around the world, including the US, Australia, Switzerland, and the UK.

“The data science program allows international companies to see the high return on investment that working with African data talent provides,” said Ball, “and many of them end up extending their contract. In fact, the project that Ethel is working on now is from 2021.”

Looking ahead, Ishango.ai is expanding its marketing, outreach, and education to find more companies and industries that align with its mission — fueling the demand for talented data scientists in Africa while making a meaningful impact on global social issues. 

They are also focusing on how to scale the employment and development of data scientists on the African continent. 

“One of our initial concerns was what happened to the other 700 applicants who didn’t make it into our development program,” mentioned Ball, reflecting on the large number of individuals who were not accepted. 

To address this gap, they have actively sought partnerships with online platforms like Dataquest and DataCamp to provide these candidates with scholarships to online skill-building programs and allow them to take part in the Ishango.ai community through webinars and events. In particular, they have prioritized scholarships for female data scientists to close the gender gaps in the field. 

“For those who weren’t accepted initially, it simply means they’re not quite ready yet,” said Ball. “We want to serve as a conduit within the ecosystem, building capacity in numerous ways and our hope is that in a year or two, they may return even more remarkable.”

Ishango.ai is also partnering with African education institutions to support their graduates with job-readiness skills and strengthen the data talent pipeline on the continent. For example, in 2021 they partnered with African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), which hosted the Ishango.ai Data Science program at their campus in Kigali, Rwanda.

In the long term, Ishango.ai wants to expand its model beyond data science to provide access to African talent across industries. By leveraging local talent and expertise, they hope to unlock valuable insights and solutions that align with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and contribute to the betterment of communities in Africa while supporting knowledge transfer and economic mobility.

“Ishango.ai is helping to prove that data science is not just a career; it’s a tool for making a social impact,” said Mensah. “It allows us to bring together all of our skills, knowledge, and experiences to solve real-world problems. The ability to leverage data for positive change is both empowering and fulfilling, and I am grateful to be part of a field — and organization — that has the potential to make a difference in the world.”

The post Leveraging Remote Work to Empower African Data Scientists appeared first on data.org.

Dependable energy reduces poverty, drives economic growth, and supports public health and well-being. The link between development and energy access is mutual: electricity can speed up growth, but progress must also create a consistent demand for energy.

Many countries require a significant transformation in their energy systems to provide affordable and modern electricity services to unserved populations. Unfortunately, gaps in accessible and accurate ground-level data hamper comprehensive energy planning in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

In 2019, The World Resources Institute (WRI), a global research organization, launched a flagship tool called Energy Access Explorer (EAE), which visualizes and analyzes energy demand and supply to equip energy planners, investors, development practitioners, and clean energy entrepreneurs with the information they need to close the energy access gap.

The Challenge

Despite global advances, the COVID-19 pandemic halted progress and worsened energy purchasing power for households in LMICs. Sub-Saharan Africa saw an increase in the number of people without access to energy for the first time since 2013, according to the International Energy Agency.

While some progress has been made, the number of people without access to electricity and clean fuels remains shockingly high.

“Today, Energy Systems Transformations is one of WRI’s priority areas considering the importance of energy for socio-economic development,” said Dimitris Mentis, Lead of EAE. “When we started this initiative, more than 1 billion people lacked access to electricity, and another 2.4 billion lacked access to clean fuels. There has been some progress, but the numbers are still staggering.”

To create financially self-sustaining electricity access initiatives, adequate, well-understood, and visible demand for electricity services must exist. Even more crucial? Connecting the goals of electricity access and sustainable development rather than approaching them separately.

For example, realizing the interplay between electricity and its national goals toward inclusive economic growth, security, and improved health and education, Kenya launched the 2019 Energy Act, requiring each of its counties to submit energy plans every three years with the ambition of achieving universal access to electricity for all Kenyans. WRI also works with partners in Kenya to provide technical support to county governments as they develop their integrated energy plans.

But all too often, these goals are not connected in LMICs.

“To address these issues, all partners — including the governments, private companies, and finance companies — need to be able to access adequate planning tools that use various data sources and inputs,” said Santiago Sinclair-Lecaros, Research Associate for EAE. “But many times, these stakeholders are operating in silos using different forecasting tools, most of which estimate investment needs without understanding aspects of demand or affordability.”

In other words, with a lack of clear and credible data, planners will often increase supply without considering the different levels of consumer need or their ability to pay for and use electricity. An initial grid connection can be prohibitively expensive, even if families could afford to make monthly payments later. Furthermore, unreliable electricity services can hinder productivity and force consumers to invest in costly backup systems like diesel generators.

The Solution

“As we dug deep into our research on energy access at WRI, we realized that if the players in the energy field don’t understand aspects of energy demand and affordability from the ​​bottom up, then they can’t create viable solutions or products,” said Mentis. “We knew we needed a platform that would synthesize granular information on both sides — demand, and supply — and that’s what led us to design and develop the Energy Access Explorer tool.”

EAE is the first online, open-source, interactive platform that uses satellite imagery alongside credible public and local data sets to visualize and analyze energy demand and supply in unserved and underserved areas.

“When we were developing the tool, we also knew we needed to reduce reliance on geographic information systems (GIS) because these tools are complex and hard to use for non-technical professionals,” said Jake Stockman, GIS Researcher, EAE. “We wanted people previously left outside of energy planning to be able to use a platform to generate customized, easy-to-read maps to understand the needs and possible solutions better.”

Off-grid developers, for example, can see where potential customers live and where demand for electricity may be high, while development finance institutions can pinpoint regions where electrification funding would achieve the highest impact. Further, clean energy entrepreneurs can access demographic and socio-economic data to understand consumer ability to pay for electricity. Impact investors and donors can identify areas that need funding to meet development goals on energy access.

But for the EAE tool to be successfully implemented and adopted, it must be localized to the particular needs of a region or country — and that requires building trust, coordination, and capacity.

That’s why the EAE team, first and foremost, engages all key local collaborators and identifies relevant geospatial tools and databases in the geographic area to ensure the platform will complement and add value to existing efforts.

“When, and only when, we agree with all of the local partners that EAE can actually add value, do we start the technical aspects of implementing the tool,” said Mentis.

In consultation with these local partners, the EAE team begins to identify key indicators and potential data sources to customize the tool for the region’s particular needs. Eventually, that data tracking turns into a dynamic database that feeds into a web infrastructure, with tailored functionality based on feedback throughout the entire process.

“But the most important part comes last,” said Sinclair-Lecaros, “during knowledge exchange and capacity building workshops. It’s here that we not only ensure that all partners are thoroughly trained on the tool so they can manage the system themselves, but we also get incredibly valuable insight into how end users are utilizing the tool and how we can make it better.

While the EAE team offers five years of technical support, their goal is to transfer ownership of the tool to the partners on the ground to ensure that it becomes truly embedded in the energy planning process and part of the larger local ecosystem. Regular knowledge exchange workshops help build this capacity and bring the local partners together so that by the end, they act in close collaboration and have a vested interest in seeing the tool continue.

The Takeaway

“Trust building is critical,” said Mentis when asked what others in the sector should take away from the success of the EAE. “Bring everyone together often, and do it in person if possible.”

He also recommends thinking broadly when identifying which partners should be involved. “We don’t just bring in the nodal agencies we work most closely with. We cast a wide net, including health and education, agriculture, in some cases urban development, private sector stakeholders, and other NGOs.”

Such an inclusive process strengthens and spreads trust across the community and dramatically helps with succession planning and capacity building. “One of the challenges that many planning solutions have been facing is that a tool or model is developed, but the stakeholder or individuals involved leave the organization or government agency,” said Stockman. “By having so many people at the table, you ensure that others are willing to step in to provide training and support as vacancies occur.”

Another essential takeaway is that solutions can only be sustained if local capacity building occurs simultaneously.

 “Building capacity is an important first step, but equally essential to ensure the capacity is retained in the country. There is no better body than an academic institution that can train the future generation of planners, clean energy providers, and data scientists,” said Mentis. “That’s why we also focus on creating partnerships with academic institutions to incorporate this particular initiative into their curriculum and training.

EAE is currently operating successfully in seven countries — Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, Nigeria, Zambia, India, and Nepal — but has plans to expand into the eight more countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Together with partners, they also want to incorporate new data sets and use cases focusing on productive uses of energy and clean cooking to customize EAE further.

“Only last year, we conducted more than 20 in-person training workshops, reaching more than 1,000 stakeholders. Moving forward, our goal is to train even more partners and equip them with an application to help them identify priority areas for energy access interventions,” said Mentis. “As we gain knowledge and experience, we are finding new and thrilling opportunities to improve our efforts for an even greater scale and meaningful energy impact.”

The post How WRI’s Energy Access Explorer Empowers Inclusive Data-driven Solutions appeared first on data.org.

Rich in both qualitative and quantitative data, Generate Health also engages community members and organizational partners with insights from indicators such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, access to prenatal care, low birth weight, and on-the-ground lived experiences. 

As the organization began its most recent strategic planning process, they wanted to know—how were they using data to contribute to the region and where could they improve. data.org’s Data Maturity Assessment (DMA) became an essential tool in identifying their current use of data and prioritizing ways to increase data insights to better serve the community. 

The Challenge

Infant mortality is a significant problem in the St. Louis region. In fact, the number of infant deaths in the region each year could fill 15 kindergarten classrooms, making it one of the worst infant mortality rates in the nation. What’s more, Black babies are three times more likely to die than White babies before their first birthday due to the toxic stress experienced by Black parents caused by racism and discrimination and the challenges in accessing equitable and culturally congruent services.

Data source: Generate Health

Armed with and fueled by this staggering data, Generate Health mobilizes critical community partners—from hospitals to health systems to social service providers—to take action. 

After two harrowing years of doing everything the organization could to help protect mothers and babies during the COVID-19 pandemic—working with partners to increase quality care through home visitations, access to perinatal behavioral health, safe sleep education, and more—the team came up for air, realizing that it was time to reflect, assess, and plan for the future. 

From the outset of their strategic planning process, leaders within Generate Health understood that data was an essential driver of every facet of their work, but that they may not be utilizing it effectively. 

“This was really an opportunity for our team to talk more strategically about data with the recognition that we have a lot of it and we’re not always using it intentionally,” said Leah Moser, director of planning and partnerships.  “We wanted to know—are we asking the right types of questions? Is the data we’re collecting helping program outcomes? Are we sharing it back to our communities and partners effectively?”

Staff across the organization deal with a variety of data types depending on their role—from health and program to finance and donor data—yet it’s not consistently shared in a way that garners greater insights.  

Further, they wanted to make sure that they were putting impacted community members at the center of data collection and analysis. 

“We’re at a moment in the organization where we not only think hard about how we leverage the information that we have, but how we take into account the communities we serve at all steps,” said Moser. “We recognize that there are power dynamics between community members and those coming into the space asking questions. So we have to make sure that we consider the impact of the questions we’re asking and that those questions are truly necessary.”

Moser and her team recognized that Generate Health needed help to take their data to the next level.

The Solution

In the St. Louis region, organizations like Washington University and the St. Louis Regional Data Alliance are helping build data capacity and collaboration among their fellow social sector organizations. It was through Generate Health’s ongoing connection with these partners that they discovered data.org’s Data Maturity Assessment. 

Launched in 2022, the Data Maturity Assessment (DMA) provides social impact organizations a snapshot of their data maturity journey plus the relevant tools and resources to move forward. The DMA provides a framework for assessment within three categories:

• Purpose: What does the organization want to use data to do? 
• Practice: How does the organization plan to use data to achieve its mission? 
• People: Who works with data and makes data-driven decisions? 

Over the last year, more than 1000 organizations have taken the DMA to identify ways to strengthen their data maturity—one of them being Generate Health, where eight individuals at different roles of the organization took the assessment. 

There are five stages—or archetypes—of maturity within an organization’s data journey, and each one presents specific opportunities to build a flourishing data practice. 

“Generate Health landed squarely in the ‘Data Informed’ archetype,” said Moser. “And this really reflects where we are. We have begun to harness the power of data for impact but we need to further develop and refine our efforts.” 

Moser points to two key areas for improvement that the DMA highlighted—better coordination and better transparency. Generate Health needed to create more holistic strategies for how they use the data they already had access to, and in turn, communicate more frequently and openly about that data with community members and partners. 

“The DMA helped us realize that storytelling is a big part of the data process,” said Moser. “When we use data outcomes to tell stories about our positive impact—especially when it’s the result of collaboration—it not only strengthens trust in our organization but encourages further data sharing and coordination with our partners.” 

The DMA also signaled the need to create stronger processes and protocols around collecting, inputting, and ensuring quality data.

Generate Health took these and other DMA findings and aligned them across their strategic plan. 

“Being able to integrate the recommendations from the DMA was a huge turning point for the organization. It provided a really comprehensive view across and pointed to where we needed to prioritize and invest,” said Moser. 

The Takeaway

What advice would they have for other organizations thinking about taking the DMA?

“Go for it.” 

Moser continues, “But after you complete the assessment, it’s critical that you make space to communicate the findings back to your team.” 

Generate Health convened two all-staff meetings to review and discuss the findings, giving a comprehensive presentation that showed all scores across categories and looking closely at areas where there was variance. 

“It was truly eye-opening to be able to have these conversations across the entire organization,” said Moser. “We had staff that hadn’t thought about their roles intersecting with data, but when you drill down they’re involved in the data pipeline every day. It became clear that we all have a responsibility to data.”

Moser noted that also having multiple people across different roles at the organization take the DMA was crucial in aligning a common understanding of the successes and challenges around data, helping the team develop a shared language, and creating buy-in for a data-driven culture.  

They then reconvened to brainstorm how to align and integrate data strategies with the strategic plan. They went through the plan in painstaking detail, identifying data needs and the resources needed to meet those needs, with an overarching goal of streamlining data processes across initiatives.

As Generate Health looks forward to the next several years, they are also thinking about what roles they need internally to sustain advanced data strategies. Ideally, Moser notes, they would have a centralized learning and evaluation role that has a broad lens across the organization.

“Funding an organizational data practitioner is tricky,” said Moser. “We need more funders who will support general operations. But through this process, we’ve gotten better at knowing what data we need and how to communicate with funders to help them see the bigger picture. And we have a lot of hope for the future of data at Generate Health.” 

The post Assessing Organizational Data Maturity Helps St. Louis Health Coalition Use Data for Greater Impact appeared first on data.org.

With 63 partners in 34 countries reaching more than 159 million women clients, Women’s World Banking works to create greater economic stability and prosperity for women.

As Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge awardees, Women’s World Banking and the University of Zurich assessed how algorithms in digital credit applications can increase lending to women borrowers, studied the applications of machine learning and AI to remove bias in lending, and explored the challenges facing digital financial services as a result of COVID-19 and the potential solutions.

Watch video

The Challenge

One billion women manage their financial lives outside of the formal financial system. That means a quarter of the world’s women don’t have access to a safe place to keep and save money or a way to obtain credit, insurance, pensions, or other financial services. 

Why? Sonja Kelly, vice president for research and advocacy at the Women’s World Bank, says it’s complicated. 

Among the barriers: legal constraints in family law and inheritance determine a woman’s ability to own property or access collateral for financing. In addition, female entrepreneurs are more likely to operate in the informal sector, often from home, providing cash-based retail or services. Add to this unconscious or built-in bias in credit scoring processes.

The good news is that recent innovations in financial technology have accelerated opportunities for those in emerging markets to access financial services easily and affordably. For instance, digital financial services allow customers to conveniently deposit even small amounts of cash to make payments, pay bills, send remittances, or store money outside of the home—all through the use of a mobile device.  

Still, access to these services is not available to all women.

For one, while mobile accounts for 85 percent of broadband connections in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), there is a significant difference in mobile ownership between men and women, with women less likely to have a smartphone and less likely to access the internet from their mobile devices. If women can’t access these new digital financial services, including even small loans, they can’t build the credit necessary to scale up to larger loans. 

Second, technology can perpetuate the same biases and exclusionary tendencies held by the people who create it. “If you put a machine on top of a human process, it’s just going to learn the human bias and make it worse,” says Kelly. Alternatively, if algorithms are built upon data composed primarily of men’s activity, they may not be built with women’s behavior patterns in mind. Women’s World Banking’s research and technical assistance work revealed that even when men and women have the same average credit score, women are more often rejected for loans. 

Coders sitting in Silicon Valley are writing code for some of the biggest creditors in the world for emerging markets. The majority of those coders are men. A close look at the outcome of the algorithms they’re creating revealed that even when men and women have the same average credit score, women are more often rejected for loans.

The Solution

In 2021, Women’s World Banking and partner institution, the University of Zurich, applied for data.org’s Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, which called for breakthrough ideas that harness the power of data to help people and communities thrive.

They were among the nine awardees who were granted funding, technical assistance, and expert guidance. With this support, the duo set out to use those resources to work with financial service providers around the world to increase credit access for low-income female entrepreneurs.

“Our work focused on solving the self-reinforcing challenges of women’s low data footprint,” said Kelly. “Their lower likelihood of seeking credit only serves to decrease their access and use of credit for their businesses. That has to change.” 

Using data from financial institutions in three countries—India, Mexico, and Colombia—the team audited credit processes for gender bias using AI and machine learning techniques alongside other statistical methods. 

They found two key trends.

First, “reject inference bias” existed in all three markets. This means a substantial subset of women rejected for loans should have been granted those loans. When compared to men who were also rejected, women often had higher credit scores on average. But the algorithms to assess applicants did not flag these creditworthy women, for myriad reasons. For example, an algorithm may rely on data points with a strong bias against women—for the amount of time spent in brick-and-mortar businesses (using mobile GPS data), even though women tend to spend more time working at home given their unpaid care responsibilities.

Second, they found a high risk of future bias in credit assessment in institutions that were heavily dependent on existing data to “train” algorithms to spot creditworthy applicants. The low representation of women in these existing datasets drove this risk.

Based on these findings, and recognizing that not every institution has months to spend auditing their risk process for bias, Women’s World Banking and the University of Zurich assembled a set of easy-to-understand analytical tools to begin conversations about gender credit bias within financial institutions. 

Their “Check Your Bias” tool is a six-dimension scorecard for CEOs and data scientists alike to assess how well they make decisions about whether and how to lend to women compared to men. This toolkit includes an open-source code for advanced data analytics to spot bias among rejected applicants.

For the institution with the highest proportion of rejected women customers, they built a gender-fair algorithm to approve new loans for women entrepreneurs. More importantly, they are processing this algorithm for other institutions struggling with similar issues and making these tools publicly available on GitHub.

The Takeaway

“Analyzing for bias and implementing solutions should be a bespoke process, as each financial institution is unique,” said Kelly. “But we recognize that success means to scale and that the adage, ‘information is power’ really is true. This is what drove us to package all of these tools into a replicable toolkit for other financial services providers.”

They are also pursuing opportunities to use AI to increase women’s access to and use of other products, including savings, and insurance to close the global gender gap in women’s financial access.

“As we evolve this project, we’re focusing less on the actual tech used and more on the outcomes of that tech,” said Kelly. “We have to back into the bias, the decision making, and the algorithms. Those three variables can be extremely gendered. If we want to make digital financial services more accessible, we have to address those first.”    

Women’s World Banking is excited to replicate and scale up its initial work by collaborating with a cohort of four institutions in 2023 to provide technical assistance and capacity-building for identifying and addressing biases, in addition to continuing to share these open-source products. 

“Gender inequity cascades through so many facets of society,” said Kelly. “But if we can start to give women greater access to financial prosperity, we can begin to really chip away at this inequity and see women thrive. And that not only affects the individual, it affects families, communities, and entire economies.” 

The post Innovative AI for Women’s Financial Inclusion appeared first on data.org.

Organizations like Break Through Tech are working towards helping women overcome gender barriers that are both pervasive and persistent in the tech industry. Currently, the percentage of computer science and artificial intelligence PhDs awarded to women languishes at 20 percent. At the cross-section of academia and the private sector, the organization helps launch women into technology-related degrees and careers.

With offerings in computing and artificial intelligence, Break Through Tech programs begin during students’ early college years for young women, with a particular emphasis on welcoming Black, Latina, Indigenous, and first-generation women, trans, and nonbinary students. The program is not only free, it also pays a stipend, allowing women to participate who would otherwise need to work to pay college expenses.

Albina Krasykova and Tammy Babad are two such students. As fellows in the AI program, they credit Break Through Tech with exposing them to meaningful career development opportunities and positioning them for success in the tech industry after graduation.

The Challenge

Gender inequality in tech is a long-documented problem, and it’s only getting worse. Only 25 percent of computing jobs in the U.S. are held by women, down from 32 percent in 1990, and unchanged since 2016. Add to that the mere two percent of women who graduate with a degree in computer science, and you have a field dominated by men.

Leading researchers of fair and ethical AI standards, such as Sharla N. Alegria, have found that lack of diversity in a field leads to a greater risk of unintentional discrimination. Too often, the people building a model or algorithm don’t know enough about the marginalized communities it is going to impact to effectively develop responsible and ethical technological solutions. 

Take the classic example of crash-test dummies. Early designs of airbags were modeled for male bodies, leading to an entirely avoidable number of women killed by airbags. In fact, only recently, in 2022, was a dummy modeled after an actual female body instead of simply a smaller version of the male dummy.

Two seniors majoring in computer science at the City College of New York (CUNY) — Albina Krasykova and Tammy Babad — know first-hand what it’s like to be one of very few women studying what’s still considered a male-centered field.

“At CUNY, literally thousands of people are majoring in computer science — so it’s even more noticeable that as a woman, you’re a minority,” said Babad.

“I have always been inspired by innovative technologies and the leaders developing solutions that will impact the whole world’s dynamics. But when it came time for me to start my career in tech, I found it to be quite challenging, especially as a woman,” said Krasykova. “I kept asking myself: ‘Am I really capable of doing something this incredible as a career? Can I actually be a leader in tech? Am I smart enough?’”

So when both women were given the opportunity to develop hands-on skills in artificial intelligence alongside other women and with the guidance of experienced female mentors, they jumped at the chance. 

The Solution

Launched in 2016 with support from founding sponsors Verizon and Accenture, Break Through Tech partnered with CUNY with one central goal: to increase the number of women graduating with degrees in computer science and related tech disciplines.

Over the next three years, CUNY saw incredible progress: women declaring computer science and related disciplines as their major increased by 61.5 percent and women graduating with relevant bachelor’s degrees increased by 95.4 percent.

Buoyed by these results, Break Through Tech began replicating its programming model in other cities, including Chicago, Washington, DC, Miami, Los Angeles, and Boston. Pivotal Ventures, an initiative of philanthropist Melinda French Gates, signed on as an investor, along with the Cognizant Foundation and Verizon.

Through deep engagement with nearly 200 industry partners, Break Through programs provide not only theoretical instruction but also practical tools to help students launch their tech careers.

“The program started with a summer [machine learning] engineering course where I learned about data analysis pipelines, training and validating ML models, and common ML/AI libraries—practical skills to help qualify me for entry-level jobs in the field,” said Babad. “And then this fall, I had an incredible experience in the AI Studio, where I worked with a team of peers on real-world projects and created a portfolio of AI solutions.”

As part of the experience, students have access to ongoing one-on-one mentorship—both from women professionals involved with the program and peers in their cohort.

“Honestly, the group of women I was working alongside felt like family,” said Krasykova.

Babad agreed, emphasizing the value of networking: “I remember so many instances where I was talking to other students and they would learn about what I was doing and say, ‘oh I should connect you to this person. Or you should contact this company, they’d be really interested in that.’ We were all there to support and elevate each other, not compete,” she said.

The Takeaway

In order to grow and diversify the tech talent pipeline, more intentional efforts are needed around recruitment, retention, and ongoing support. And when more women are in that pipeline, the industry will flourish.

“As a student of Break Through Tech, I can confidently say that the organization has had a huge impact on my journey to pursue a career in the tech industry,” said Babad. “I was given access to amazing resources and an incredible mentor all while learning about one of the coolest technologies in the world—artificial intelligence. What can be better than that?”

With that goal in mind, Break Through Tech is excited to expand to more cities nationwide and has a long-term vision of growing tech hubs across the country that will activate and align both sides of a city’s tech ecosystem: academia and industry.

“This organization is inspiring women to work on the most innovative AI projects, while also building a healthy community of female leaders,” said Babad. “Leaders who not only care about one another but are focused on creating a positive impact on the world.”

Organizations like Break Through Tech are helping to engage and inspire the next generation of women technologists—technologists that have the skill set and confidence to break down the gender barriers the tech industry has upheld for so long.

“We are living in a world where technology grows more powerful every day,” said Krasykova. “If we can have a diverse pool of people making decisions about what our tech will do and how it will do it, the possibility of creating fair and equitable solutions to modern problems will be closer in reach.”

The post Program Helps Women Enter and Thrive in a Male-Dominated Field appeared first on data.org.