Civic Tech Weekly Feb 4: Data innovation for sustainable development
This edition: Civic tech and open government news from Nigeria🇳🇬Ghana🇬🇭Argentina🇦🇷Barzil🇧🇷Uruguay🇺🇾Chile🇨🇱 and US🇺🇸
1. Fund for sustainable development announces seven grant winners
Seven winning projects have been announced for the Collaborative Data Innovations for Sustainable Development Fund, addressing crucial developmental issues. The fund, launched by World Bank’s Development Data Group and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, is running for the third round.
Fund recipients seek to use technology to solve local issues in an efficient and practical way. Examples of grant winners are an urban sanitation project in Madagascar, an early warning system for recognising disease outbreaks in Nigeria, and integrated soil mapping for coffee farmers in Ghana.
2. Buenos Aires levels gender gap using data
The city of Buenos Aires has been proactive in finding solutions to gender gaps. The city government participated actively in the Gender Do-athon organised by Open Heroines during the International Open Data Conference last year, and organised a gender data camp to put lessons learnt into action.
Innovative prototypes resulted from the gender data camp: a campaign to highlight the unequal distribution of unpaid domestic work (of home and family care), and a website to enable women to find out the average pay range in the job market to not under-state the expected salary when looking for a job. These projects will receive some funding, and are expected to be publicly launched in a few months.
3. Search and rescue efforts in Brazil dam tragedy supported by technology
The collapse of a Brazilian dam on the 25th of January has now a death toll of 60 and hundreds missing. Authorities and volunteers are using technology to aid relief efforts.
Search teams are using records of the last signals sent by cellphones within the disaster area (provided by telecommunication companies) to narrow down the potential location of victims. Volunteers from Israel have brought in equipment including a sonar device to locate buried bodies. Individuals and companies interested to contribute can also join Whatsapp groups collaborating on areas ranging from the monitoring of drones and balloons, data analytics and supercomputer resource use, to health tech capabilities and project management skills to organize teams.
4. Better city planning for cyclists and pedestrians with transport analytics
Streetlight Data is a transportation analytics company that examines publicly available location and movement data from mobile phones to gauge different modes of travel. It has recently developed a tool to measure cycling and walking as part of how people move in city streets.
This data will be very useful for the design and evaluation of pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, says Laura Schewel, CEO of StreetLight Data. With this information, city planners can then prioritise locations that have a higher concentration of cyclists and pedestrians.
5. Omidyar invests in education middleware Agenda Edu and Blended
When looking at technological support for education institutions, middleware – software that supports daily operations in areas like communication, finance, marketing, or human resources – is often overlooked. In the context of education, they are important to save time on classroom management and administrative requirements, such as taking attendance, grading homework, and capturing student data.
Seeing the need for education middleware, Omidyar is announcing its investments into two platforms providing education middleware in South America: Agenda Edu (Brazil) and Blended (Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile). Agenda Edu already has more than 1 million active users and serves more than 1,300 schools. Blended is the most widely used platform in Argentina, and is focusing on regional expansion in Latin America.
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