Stories, ideas, and updates from DGers around the world

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.

As governments look to “build back better,” we can expect an influx of government spending to stimulate the economy, and a shift in priority goods and services to purchase. While the world transitions from emergency response to recovery, governments’ focus will shift from using technology to procure other products, to procuring technology products themselves.

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.

With citizens' lives on the line and government spending at record highs, ensuring accountability to citizens is imperative to maintaining trust and effectively managing procurement in response to COVID-19. Last week, President Uhuru Kenyatta directed the Ministry of Health to come up with a transparent, open method and mechanism through which all tenders and procurement done by Kenya Medical Supplies Agency will be available online. Much can be learned from DG's experience implementing an Open Contracting Portal in Makueni County, Kenya.

Achieving resilient public procurement goes beyond digitization and automation: data generated through these processes must also be used by government to make smarter decisions – particularly during crisis – and by civil society to hold government accountable for those decisions.

In a global emergency, public spending helps acquire materials to respond to the crisis, and stimulates the economy to assist with post-crisis recovery. In recent months, DG set out to understand what public procurement policies, contracting mechanisms, and data and digital capabilities were required to procure a rapid and effective emergency response.

In developing the VIFAA Kenya Dashboard, we worked in partnership with Africafertilizer.org (AFO) and the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) to understand the cycle of demand, supply, and use of Kenya’s fertilizer data. Grace Chilande of AFO and IDFC provides more information on why the dashboard is needed and how it will be used.

We are thrilled to announce that the Visualizing Insights for African Agriculture (VIFAA) Kenya Fertilizer Dashboard is now live! From fertilizer price to consumption, this dashboard makes Kenya’s fertilizer data easier to access, use, and share for national and county level decision making

In advance of the first VIFAA country dashboard launch next week, we will explore the importance and source of accurate and reliable data for each of the indicators. This is a crucial step in making data available in a way that stakeholders can use to inform their decisions.