Surfacing Valuable Information
How do policymakers, local leaders, or community members make decisions when data that supports public health is unreliable, difficult to use, or does not exist? When resources are scarce or data is not actionable, making decisions for public health is challenging.
Supporting Public Health
We work with communities and policymakers to identify gaps, encourage greater data use, and train healthcare workers and decision-makers. Through visual tools, data landscaping, and guidance on data use, DG helps communities see how and where investments in data, tools, or interventions can support public health.
Focusing on Outcomes
Our partnerships in health programming help to highlight patterns and gaps to identify underlying factors that are important to improved health outcomes.
Data for Health Systems
Many community health systems are under-resourced, with overworked clinic staff that rely on health officials to allocate limited funding to vulnerable populations. We work with partners to implement cost-effective, sustainable systems that can assist with workload, support useful data reporting, and surface patterns to strengthen healthcare delivery.
Informing Policymakers
When data is unavailable or unreliable, policymakers are less able to make informed decisions in the best interest of the public. We work to fill the data gaps by building systems that present data for easy analysis and resource allocation.
Building Data Visualizations
Built through a collaborative process, DG’s health data visualization tools often focus on the most vulnerable — women and children, adolescents, and newborns — to help advocates, policymakers, and community members better understand and show others where interventions and investments could make a difference.
Highlights
The Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI)
Tobacco usage rates are on the rise in low- and middle-income countries, including within sub-Saharan Africa. Over 8 million deaths are caused annually by tobacco use, including 1.2 million non-smokers who die from second-hand smoke. Through the Tobacco Control Data Initiative (TCDI), Development Gateway is working with policymakers, governments, and civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa to use data to pass and monitor tobacco control legislation to reduce tobacco use.
PREMAND: Preventing Maternal and Neonatal Deaths in Northern Ghana
The PREMAND dashboard highlights interactions of social, cultural, and geographic factors in contributing to maternal and neonatal health outcomes. The flexible tool serves a range of users: from district health policymakers to local community leaders. It translates highly technical research data into an easily-understandable map, to make this information approachable and usable by decision-makers at all levels.
Des Chiffres et Des Jeunes (DCDJ) Program
The DCDJ program seeks to improve the data ecosystem in Côte d'Ivoire, increase the supply and demand for data – particularly health data – and to train and support data users.
Read the Latest
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.
HIV/AIDS Response Through Youth-Led Community Mapping in Côte d’Ivoire
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.
Open Data Center for Health Enables Côte d’Ivoire’s Health Workers to Improve HIV Program Coverage
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.