Investment in & Incentives for Data Policy
Partner governments, development agencies, and international NGOs often struggle to prioritize investments in data and information systems; incentivize and empower data users; and assess the impact of data in decision-making. However, we thrive answering these questions. They cut across sectors and require institutions to weigh strategic tradeoffs, understand the decision-making landscape, and synthesize evidence to determine where, how, and how much to invest in data. Helping institutions identify barriers to decision making, and finding effective solutions for maximizing the value of their data, is a key focus of our work.
Informed by Implementation
Through years of collaborative technical implementations across the globe, we have seen firsthand what makes data, technology, and evidence effective. Our adaptive and sustainable approach provides a foundation for partners to grow. This perspective supports governments, international organizations, and local leaders to formulate policy, create data strategies, and measure results.
Shaping Data Strategy and Policy
DG’s applied experience gives us valuable policy insights. Our globally-based team understands sectoral and country-specific contexts, our partnership ethos means we are well equipped to ask questions and seek answers, and our implementation approach centers on co-creating flexible, iterative solutions to achieve better outcomes.
Global Data Policy
Learnings from implementing data management systems and providing strategic advisory services are our foundation for global data policy inputs. Through publications, events, and our partnerships with global institutions and multilateral organizations, we provide practical insights that pave the way for sustained global digital and data governance and strategy.
Strategic Advisory Services
Working directly with partners, governments, and institutions, we help organizations to understand their own decision-making processes; the role of data in those processes; and where and how investing in, updating, or changing their internal data use processes can help to achieve institutional goals and priorities.
Data Governance and Data Privacy
We support partners to appropriately manage their data through frameworks, policies, and data governance guidelines. While promoting open data and open-source technologies, we prioritize issues of data privacy around the safe collection, storage, deletion, and sharing of data.
Data Strategy & Policy Highlights
Open Contracting Support & Training in Bandung, Indonesia
Instead of our typical work as a technology builder or implementer, it was that of mentor. DG provided training and coaching to a municipal government development team in Bandung, Indonesia to implement Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) data mapping.
UNICEF Strategic Planning of Data for Children
DG built diagnostics and data action plans for nine country and two regional UNICEF offices. These plans aimed to identify where UNICEF is best-placed to support data for country priorities. DG spoke with nearly 350 stakeholders to better understand the national data ecosystem, its actors, drivers, what creates bottlenecks, and what improves decisions and outcomes.
Read the Latest
The Building Blocks for Successful Data Visualization Tools
In 2020, we sought to answer a pivotal question: what are the good practices and lessons learned from the many existing women’s, children's, and adolescent’s health data visualization tools? In partnership with UNICEF, DG worked to identify good practices, as well as to determine any differences for emergency-focused data visualization tools, using COVID-19 as a test case.
The State of Data in DG’s Work
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.
Data Strategies Playbook
DG is pleased to announce the publication of our latest white paper, Designing Data Strategies: A Playbook for Action. This work aims to distill lessons learned from our research and collaboration, designing data strategies with development and humanitarian agencies. In the current ‘data revolution’ era, data and digital are both a strategic asset and a source of institutional risk.