Stories, ideas, and updates from DGers around the world

Since 2018, Development Gateway has led the Des Chiffres et Des Jeunes (DCDJ) project. A mainstay of DCDJ is the Data Fellowship program, which provides data science training to young professionals in Cote d’Ivoire, followed by internships with government ministries, agencies, or NGOs that are part of the fight against HIV/AIDS. The SuperFellows reinforce capacity building and sustainability in the data ecosystem.

Chaque année, les gouvernements dépensent des milliards de dollars, dans la commande publique de biens et services - s’ils ne mettent pas en avant le concept de redevabilité, beaucoup de ressources peuvent être perdues au gaspillage ou à la corruption. Aujourd'hui, plus que jamais, la transparence dans les marchés publics, plus précisément la commande publique ouverte, est nécessaire au Sénégal et dans le monde, au moment les gouvernements se mobilisent pour lutter contre la pandémie du Covid-19 et essaient de s'en remettre, tout en s'efforçant de venir en aide aux populations les plus vulnérables. 

Each year, governments spend trillions of dollars through public procurement of goods and services – without a focus on accountability, much can be lost through waste or corruption. Today, more than ever, transparency in public procurement and  Open Contracting is needed in Senegal and around the world as governments respond to and recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

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?