Population Council Research that makes a difference

Phase 1: Understanding barriers to data sharing

Development planning and effective evaluation of programs and policy interventions rely upon sound data. Demographic data are particularly important where resource allocation decisions may be key to reducing poverty and fostering development. This project is part of a larger donor-sponsored initiative to assess what is being done to support the access and use of sound data and to identify opportunities for strengthening data access and use.

In the first phase of the Demographic Data for Development (3D) project, researchers conducted interviews with more than 100 data producers, policymakers, and other consumers of information (e.g., civil society organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the media). These interviews explored factors that limit data collection, use, and sharing. Researchers inquired specifically about censuses, national surveys, budgeting, and service-use statistics to determine how policymakers obtain the data they need to develop and evaluate policies.

Results from these case studies suggested that data play only a modest role in the policymaking process. According to interview participants, data use among nontechnical audiences is limited by problems accessing and understanding the information. Interviewees suggested that there is little incentive to address barriers to data access and use because the greatest demand for data comes from external actors, such as the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations, not domestic constituencies.

Phase 2: Increasing demand for data by improving how journalists access and use data

Based on the work accomplished during the project's first phase, the Council hypothesized that data access, use, and demand operate in a virtuous circle—the more that data are used, the greater the demand will be for more data. And as demand grows so will the extent of data access and use. Therefore, to increase the domestic demand for data and promote the use of data in national policymaking, the second phase of 3D is designed to support initiatives that will improve data access and use. These initiatives are targeting a natural constituency for development data—journalists and members of the media.

In this phase of the project, the Council and its partners are working to improve journalists' access to data by convening dialogues between data producers and consumers, organizing Open Data conferences, creating a Web-based catalog of existing data resources, and hosting a data sharing and visualization contest in each country—"Developers for Development." These contests will promote the use of data in decisionmaking by challenging teams of developers and data users to create new, open-source applications for presenting development data.

In addition to these access initiatives, the Council and its partners will also support efforts to revise and extend the data training available to journalism students and professionals, create a field correspondent data collection guide for the network of laypeople who inform journalists' reporting, develop a Web-based article-builder application that will help journalists understand and use development data from the World Bank, and create a resource for editors to use when reviewing how data are presented in newspaper articles.

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Related article from Population Briefs: "Analysis examines availability and use of data for development" (PDF)