In 2019, with an estimated 250 million women in Sub-Saharan Africa facing financial exclusion, under the French Presidency, the G7 Partnership for Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa (G7P) was created to promote social equality and reduce the digital gender divide by realizing the value of digital financial services and supporting African governments, regulators, banks, and financial institutions to build more gender-inclusive, sustainable, and responsible digital financial systems. The G7P brings together a myriad of existing institutions working in Africa on complementary issues of research, investment, and regulation around digital finance and its potential benefits for women. This report addresses the request from the French G7 Presidency to support greater transparency and accountability across G7 initiatives. This year’s report focuses on the theme of “trust” and offers reflections on the progress of the collaborative in its second full year of implementation and provides recommendations for improving its collective impact.
While billions of gigabytes of data are produced daily, far too often unused data pass into a “data graveyard” (Custer et al, 2017) – where they go unutilized, precluding evidence-informed decisions from being made. This is especially dangerous at a time when intersecting crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and energy and food insecurity put a premium on decision-making that incorporates the best data. Additionally, our understanding of how data is transformed into usable information for decision-making remains weak relative to the efforts to produce data, and many producers of official statistics remain unclear about how to assess data uptake and impact. In this report, SDSN TReNDS and Open Data Watch, set out to provide conceptual clarity about the challenges of improving data use and a way forward for research by sourcing best practices from countries through a survey and in-depth interviews.
Earth Observation (EO) data are increasingly being used by governments use to make key development decisions. The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. As the pandemic impacted society’s most vulnerable disproportionately, effective delivery of social protection required more timely and localized data – two critical benefits EO offers users.
This case study was written by Eduardo Sojo to support TReNDS’ sub-group on data stewardship and support research requested by the United Nations Statistics Commission’s (UNSC) Working Group on Data Stewardship. The case study was written after conducting meetings with members of the regional north-center team of INEGI, members of the state of Guanajuato planning agency (IPLANEG) responsible for integrating the State Statistical and Geographical System of Information (SEIEG), and members of the Municipal Planning Institute of León, Guanajuato (IMPLAN) responsible for providing data and information to local authorities and decision-makers. The ‘City Manager’ of León was also present during the meetings. The case study highlights that even in a very robust National Statistical System, such as in Mexico, there are many opportunities to reinforce support and capacity building to local governments.
An estimated 400 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack a financial account, and 60% of these individuals are women. And while the rise of the digital financial services (DFS) sector has the potential to disrupt old gender divides, a number of barriers still need to be overcome. In 2019, the G7 recognized the potential of DFS for promoting its mission of social equality. This commitment resulted in the creation of The G7 Partnership for Women’s Digital Financial Inclusion in Africa (G7P) which draws financial contributions from France, the UK, and the Gates Foundation and implementation strength from the World Bank, UNCDF, AFDB, Oxford School, AfDB, and J-PAL. This report tracks the implementation progress of the partnership and offers suggestions to improve partnership performance.
With support from Partners for Review (P4R), SDSN TReNDS undertook a systematic review of the recent scientific literature on innovative data collection methods and the use of big data to support national monitoring of the SDGs. These methods were mapped against specific criteria to assess their feasibility, rigor, replicability, and sustainability between now and 2030 and the findings are catalogued in a repository. The results and findings of this review have helped to feed into this report, which considers the partnership processes required to enable uptake at the national level, including the policy, regulatory, and practical aspects relevant for partnerships.
With the rise of new technologies, the use of non-traditional data sources in recent years has increased exponentially. This research paper seeks to cultivate a better understanding of the governance factors that improve trust and confidence in the use of non-traditional data sources for official statistical production, with a focus on legal arrangements, quality assurance practices, and policy changes.
While there have been worldwide improvements in public health over the past few decades, new viruses and other pandemics are expected to increase as we move towards high-density, urban living. But with only 49 countries reporting high-quality cause of death data to the WHO, the exact burden of infectious diseases is impossible to know. As made clear by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a vital need for identifying and monitoring the spread of new infectious diseases.
With the influx of new technologies being used as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has brought about a range of new questions around how data should or should not be used; intellectual property rights; limitations on data re-use; how long data should be used for; and ultimately what should happen to collected data once the pandemic is over. Building upon issues discussed in the C4DC report, “Laying the Foundation for Effective Partnerships: An Examination of Data Sharing Agreements,” this brief examines the potential of sunset clauses or sunset provisions to be a legally binding, enforceable, and accountable way of ensuring COVID-19 related data sharing agreements are wound down responsibly at the end of the pandemic.
This case study documents a data collaboration between the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), Vodafone Ghana, and Flowminder. The collaboration enabled the GSS to access insights from mobile phone data to plan public health and sustainable development policies, and it is a useful example of how a government and a private company were able to work with an intermediary partner to gain insights from sensitive data. The mobile data being used by the GSS as a result of the collaboration has proven especially valuable during the current Covid-19 pandemic to document the impact of restriction measures in Ghana.
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