Posts focused on Health

Abdoulaye Bagaya, a DCDJ Fellow in Côte d’Ivoire, developed an app for FSU COM Abobo Sagbe hospital during his 7-month internship placement. The app helps community counselors, healthcare assistants, and clinic counselors manage patient contact and treatment information.

Working with local partners in Côte d'Ivoire, our DCDJ program built a searchable list of hyper-local datasets across the country related to topics of community interest. Through this inventory, local officials, clinicians, community groups, researchers, and others can contribute to and access information on datasets in the community. 

As we review our strategy, we plan to share here much of what we’ve learned through programming in more than a dozen countries – from our work and from our excellent partners – about the state of data in agriculture, tobacco control, open contracting, and the extractive industries. For each theme, we’ll explore who are the key data users, the decisions they make, the most important data gaps, and the crucial risks of data (mis)use. Here we share previews from some of our flagship programs.

With support from DCDJ, local youth in Côte d’Ivoire organized a successful mapathon to get community resources, landmarks, and risk zones in Daloa – particularly those relevant to young people – on the map. Through the process, they acquired new skills including OSM tracker to develop map layers, how to collect local data, and how to communicate results stored in a new database developed through the program.

Through partnerships in Côte d’Ivoire, DG collaborated to build a platform which integrates and visualizes data from multiple sources, using maps and dashboards, for policymakers and health workers. A handoff ceremony caps a two-year effort to improve the data and tools accessible to the country’s health workers.

Ali Diakité is an alum of the first DCDJ Fellowship cohort. After two months of intensive data science training, he was placed with the National AIDS Control Program (PNLS), the government agency that coordinates the national response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. During the Fellowship, Ali built a solution that noticeably improved PNLS' efficiency and data quality. As the primary HIV/AIDS control program in Côte d’Ivoire, PNLS uses the tool to make direct improvements to its data quality, timeliness, and epidemic response.

Several months ago, the Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI) team completed an assessment in South Africa to understand the key priorities and data needs of those who work in tobacco control. During the assessment, the team talked to a variety of stakeholders within government agencies, civil society organizations, and academia who work on promoting, advocating, or evaluating tobacco control policies.

As experts scramble to better understand why Covid-19 can impact individual patients so differently, a growing body of evidence suggests that one factor contributing to the severity of the disease is whether the patient is a smoker. Could enhanced tobacco control policies be another tool for governments fighting the virus?