Stories, ideas, and updates from DGers around the world

As the world continues to face the effects of Covid-19, policymakers are turning to data more than ever to understand the scope of the crisis, anticipate its spread, and formulate policy decisions; but gender-disaggregated data are missing from the picture. Knowing what information is being captured and what is not could impact decision-making.

Since 2017, DG has been working with the Government of Makueni County in Kenya and Hivos to improve the quality of procurement processes through an online portal that promotes transparency and accountability. The platform is different in that it provides county-level instead of national-level open contracting information. In this post, we highlight the technology behind the portal.

The Government of Jordan has demonstrated a commitment to digitization and digital transformation to increase transparency, trust, and accountability. This guest post by Mays Abdel Aziz, of the Government of Jordan’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, looks at how the Aid Flows Information System fits into efforts to build trust.

Yesterday USAID launched its first-ever Digital Strategy, which aims to bring coherence and direction to programs and approaches already employed by the agency. We found a lot to like, but also some key misses that could limit the impact on USAID’s work. Here are five highlights recommendations for improvement.

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?

Covid-19 has changed the way many of us work & engage across teams. As with most organizations, DG’s DC-based team became fully remote a few weeks ago. While this was a shift for some of our staff, most DGers are globally-based and had already been working remotely. We want to take a moment to look at what we have been doing all along and what we have added to keep our team connected and supported.

From our experience understanding data use, the primary obstacle to measuring and organizational learning from feminist outcomes is that development actors do not always capture gender data systematically. What can be done to change that?

As we approach Beijing+25, awareness about the literal value of gender equality continues to rise—but actual progress has stalled. The 2020 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report reveals women’s under-representation is most acute in data, digital, and technology fields that will drive economic growth over the next decade. According to the report, just 12 percent of cloud computing, 15 percent of engineering, and 26 percent of data and artificial intelligence professionals are women.

March is International Women’s History Month. Throughout the next weeks, DG will be publishing a series of blogs that highlight and honor the work that we and others are doing to support the vital role of women. We’re kicking off the series with this post, highlighting the importance of gender data.

In line with Development Gateway’s commitment to using open-source technology, and building on the transparency and community benefits we’ve seen from opening the Aid Management Platform (AMP) source code last year, DG is pleased to announce that we’ve made the AMP Offline application fully open-source.