Taking responsibility for big global challenges
Dr Sema Sgaier is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Surgo Foundation, the first organisation to be funded through the COVIDaction Data Challenge. What drives her to pursue her work and bring data to the forefront of the response to the pandemic?
You may remember that the first applicant funded through the COVIDaction Data Challenge was the Surgo Foundation. The award given combines technical assistance and money to promote the use of data to support a more effective and targeted response to COVID-19. You can read more about the details of the funding here.
The Surgo Foundation launched its Africa COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index (Africa CCVI) in July. It assesses regions in 48 countries across the continent on their ability to cope with the social, economic and health impacts of a COVID-19 outbreak. Africa CCVI is the first Pan-African index to gauge vulnerability to COVID-19 in this way, not just across countries, but within countries at a granular level. The work was based on Surgo’s U.S. COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index which currently features as a resource for the CDC.
Dr Sema Sgaier is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Surgo Foundation, she kindly granted us an interview via email to get to know the woman behind the work and learn more about what it is to take responsibility for big global challenges. In terms of responding to COVID-19, Sgaier and her colleagues spotted the urgent need for data work early on, “Many parts of the continent have minimal data on health system infrastructure; sparse and patchwork testing; and far more limited health care resources than Asia, North America, and Europe. We also know that COVID-19 will not impact all African regions in the same way. What makes a country vulnerable to COVID-19 can vary from country to country, and region to region. Data to appropriately assess Africa’s vulnerability to COVID-19 is hard to come by, especially at this region to region level.”
So what drives Sgaier to create groundbreaking work in the development field? “The multidisciplinary nature of development work really appeals to me,” she explains. “The problems we are working on in development are big problems that require many different perspectives coming together: not just medical or health perspectives, but political perspectives, behavioral perspectives, sociological, ethical perspectives, and more.”
This crossover approach not only benefits the work that is emerging, but also appeals to Sema on a personal level. Inclined to be sociable and seeking wider interactions, she took her scientific training into public health. “I had entered the field of science because I wanted to be able to develop tangible solutions to health-related problems,” she says. “That was my ultimate goal, and for a long time, the way I approached it was through basic scientific research. But through that process I came to realize how much I missed working with people, and working internationally especially since I have lived all over the world. I also realized that I wanted to make a difference in my lifetime, rather than wait decades to see the fruits of my work. That’s why I decided to enter the global health field.”
Interdisciplinary work also tends to mean continually updating knowledge and becoming familiar with new areas, “It is definitely a learning process, “ says Sgaier. “One which requires always trying to be up-to-date on all the newest developments, research, findings, and applications. Staying abreast of all of this is what makes my work most exciting. I’m constantly finding new ways to solve old problems.”
“When someone tells me I can’t do something. That’s a surefire way to get me to try harder!”
There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in order to provide as much possible information to communities, governments and organisations so that they can be better prepared for COVID-19. The future of second waves is uncertain at time of writing, but the challenges don’t seem to phase Sgaier, “I am really motivated by two things: having interesting problems to solve, and when someone tells me I can’t do something. That’s a surefire way to get me to try harder!”
Lifelong learning
Sgaier grew up in a multi-lingual, multinational household. Moving around and living in different places during her formative years helped to broaden her perspective and working with a wide selection of people from different sectors has also informed her vision of what is possible. “One of the programs that really shaped me as a global health professional was the Avahan program, a large-scale HIV/AIDS prevention program in India, which I worked on while at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” she explains. “Everyone working with the team I was on was from the private sector, which enabled me to learn how to apply business principles to my work. The program was focused on high-risk communities including sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injecting drug users. Understanding our community and developing community owned solutions was central. We also looked carefully at how to use data in a practical way to solve problems. These three elements in particular really influenced me.”
“…it’s not enough to simply generate insights from data; we need to spur action around those insights.”
Big data is not enough
The importance of data has been well-recognised over the past decade and in step with that the amount of data has increased. In 2020 alone, 44 zettabytes of data is expected to be created by everyone online. Although we’re good at making data, there are issues that need to be addressed in order to make it useful and beneficial. “Data usage is still an issue. It’s not streamlined, it’s too vertical, capacity is lacking and so on. Consequently there is a more concerted effort to solve for all of these challenges, and I believe we’re on a positive path to doing so,” says Sgaier.
“Another key issue is that it’s not enough to simply generate insights from data; we need to spur action around those insights. Nowhere is this clearer than in the current pandemic, especially in the United States. Is the U.S. making data-driven decisions to improve health and fight the pandemic? No, and this is what we continually need to improve upon.”
The idea of a huge swathe of data sounds very appealing but when different organisations and geographies are not measuring the same thing, the usefulness of the data can be diminished. “Here in the United States when the pandemic began, it was an academic institution, Johns Hopkins University, that started collecting and relaying COVID-19 data because there wasn’t a global body equipped to do this,” Sgaier explains. “Today, if you look at much of the COVID data and analysis being done, you see all these new groups that have sprung up on their own to fill this need. This is a good thing, to be sure, but clearly there is no cohesion in data collection, analysis, and response. We haven’t even agreed upon the key indicators to track, let alone who is going to track it moving forward.”
Where next?
Vulnerability indices are a great tool for helping governments, communities, health and other organisations to come to decisions based on information that changes how they may be able to respond to the pandemic. Much has already been done to make the index accessible across Africa, including promotion by COVIDaction partner Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and associated uptake across national statistic offices. The index is also being made available to humanitarian actors, through the Digital Impact Alliance, to inform COVID-19 response. However, there is still more work that can be done and the journey may not be a walk in the park.
The foundation has plans to develop additional granular vulnerability indices with other countries. “We’ll use emerging data sets that are in those countries. I hope to be able to share more details about this soon,” Sema says. “The index is most valuable when we layer on two additional types of data sets — data on the trajectory of the pandemic (cases, deaths), and data on the responses (testing, uptake of non-pharmaceutical interventions, wrap-around services, and, eventually, vaccines). We will be layering on this data. But the data can also be very patchy. For example, we know scale up of testing is varying in degrees across the continent, making it impossible to know the true case count.”
“One of the things that the COVID pandemic has really highlighted for me is that leadership and coordination are absolutely critical elements of an effective response.”
Sgaier’s learnings from the Surgo Foundation work are important indicators that can help us all plan for future events. Getting standards into data collection for comparison is a start but organisation and planning are also key. “One of the things that the COVID-19 pandemic has really highlighted for me is that leadership and coordination are absolutely critical elements of an effective response,” she says. “Unless you have a coordinated response, and very clear policies and guidelines for different institutions working with each other and delineating their roles, you’re just never going to have an effective public health response. I think especially in the U.S., we underestimate public health and management issues — which are so very important to public health. We need strong management, strong coordination, and strong leadership.”
Visibility will hopefully help the foundation and other organisations with their data work. People are already talking about the project which increases the likelihood that it will end up in the hands of the people who need it most. “We are currently having promising conversations with a variety of stakeholders — governments, data organizations, NGOs and others — about integrating the Africa CCVI into their own COVID-19 dashboards, as well as helping them use the insights from our index to support local decision-making. I am also grateful that several media outlets have used it to heighten awareness about the pandemic in Africa including the Associated Press, National Public Radio, Financial Times, the Economist, and more.”
Find out more about the work of the Surgo Foundation and take a look at the vulnerability indices for yourself. The work continues to grow and COVIDaction is proud to help leverage this innovative and vital use of data.
