#Data4COVID19 Round-Up 17 December
Welcome to The GovLab’s #Data4COVID19 Round-Up. This temporary, weekly curation will provide you with notable updates to the #Data4COVID19 data collaborative repository and other information meant to facilitate data stewardship in the ongoing pandemic. Have an interesting novel coronavirus-related project worth sharing? Send it to us at datastewards@thegovlab.org so we can consider it as an addition.
A Year in Review
It’s been a long year.
Since The GovLab launched its #Data4COVID series in March, the world has seen no shortage of crises. Institutions have been strained. In our mission to make these institutions more open, collaborative, and legitimate, our staff has had to contend with many difficult problems.
We’ve tried to learn from these various crises to help decision makers meet the immense challenges they face. This work includes strengthening the capabilities of public interest institutions. Toward that end, we worked on many projects this year related to helping others operate more openly, collaboratively, effectively, and legitimately.
In this final #Data4COVID19 newsletter of 2020, we invite you to join us in reflecting on some of our work over the past year. From our initial Call for Action to the Data Assembly to the Open Data Policy Lab, we think we have produced work that remains relevant for all those seeking innovative solutions to our current situation.
Read about our various projects here.
#Data4COVID19 Africa Challenge
On December 15, 2020, the French Development Agency (AFD), in collaboration with Expertise France and The GovLab, released a call for proposals for data-driven research. The #Data4COVID19 Africa Challenge solicits innovative ideas for ways to re-use data to provide actionable insights on COVID-19 in Africa and empower local leaders.
The challenge seeks ideas targeted at the public health, economics, and socio-political consequences of the ongoing crisis. In particular, it is looking for proposals for data collaboratives that can provide actionable intelligence for Africa-based decision-makers through the sharing of non-traditional datasets. Given the rapidly evolving nature of the crisis, preference is given to projects that can quickly form and begin producing results.
Applications are open through February 5, 2021. Successful applicants will receive up to EUR 100,000 in funding to pursue their proposal. The lead partner must be established in one of the African Union countries. We encourage interested applicants to review the full requirements and apply at the challenge’s dedicated website: https://datachallenge.africa/ .
What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository
The GovLab has been working to update the #Data4COVID19 repository. In the last two weeks, it added 7 entries, expanding it to 218 in total. Projects now span:
- East Asia and Pacific: 10
- Europe and Central Asia: 43 (+1)
- Latin America and the Caribbean: 7
- Middle East and North Africa: 1
- North America: 73 (+3)
- South Asia: 4
- Sub-Saharan Africa: 12
- Global: 80 (+4)
Each week, we will highlight a few of those recent additions to the repository that you might have missed. These examples illustrate innovative methods, appear demand-driven, or otherwise demonstrate an attempt to translate insights into action. We also aspire, to the extent possible, to make the selections geographically diverse. A project’s inclusion does not indicate endorsement by The GovLab or confirmation of its success in meeting its goals.
In this final #Data4COVID19 Round-Up of the 2020 year, we focus on the ways researchers are exploring how public health intersects with norms and human behavior.
MIT COVID-19 Beliefs, Behaviors, and Norms Survey: Researchers from the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) partnered with Facebook Data for Good to create a survey to understand users’ beliefs, behaviors, and responses to government interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of this survey are published on a public dashboard and API, and microdata is shared through private data sharing agreements with researchers at Facebook and MIT.
COVID-19 Sex-Disaggregated Data Tracker: Global Health 50/50, an independent health equity research organization based at University College London, with support from the International Center for Research on Women and African Population and Health Research Center, maintains a global data tracker that allows individuals to see the role gender and sex play in the risks of COVID-19 infection, severe illness, and death. Though there are significant gaps due to many countries producing publicly available sex-disaggregated data on a regular basis, the tracker reveals men are significantly more at risk than women globally.
COVID-19 and Recovery: Estimates From Payment Card Transactions: The US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis is using card transaction data obtained from the global financial services tech company Fiserv to assess economic health amid the pandemic. The data is based on transactions provided by merchants continuously. It is aggregated to state and national level and used to assess consumer spending in various industries, including food services, accommodations, clothing, and health care. The Bureau has provided 15 reports summarizing major insights since June 2020.
You can also find additional resources related to data stewardship and data collaboration here.
