Tag Archives: Data

World Bank data infrastructure: shortening the path from data to insights

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Data is not valuable in a vacuum. Data is only valuable once information, insight or in data_infrastructure_visualother words knowledge is extracted from it and is used to make decisions, shape policies, and change behaviors.

Data scientists, analysts, and researchers spend a significant amount of time and effort extracting knowledge from data and communicating it. Because extracting knowledge from data can be expensive, it is important to find ways to reduce its cost. A robust and well-designed data infrastructure can contribute to this cost reduction by smoothing the frictions involved with data analytics projects: storing, searching, accessing, understanding, cleaning, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing data. Lowering that cost can go a long way toward increasing data use and knowledge production.

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Is education ready to work in data-intensive environments?

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What do initiatives such as personalized and adaptive learning, chatbots for education, untitled.pngautomatic translators or the use of predictive learning analytics have in common? All of them are components of a ‘data-driven education’.

In many countries, there is a clear interest in expanding the role of digital technologies in education, which inevitably is leading towards more data-intensive educational systems. With the growing interest for adaptive intelligent tutoring systems offering natural language interaction, tools for predicting school dropout or new automated systems to boost student recruitment, it is likely that the importance of data-intensive technologies for education will increase in the years to come.

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eC2: Scoping and Design of Integrated Data Platform.

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Deadline: 10-Aug-2019 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.) Data-for-Development_cover-image_web

The World Bank (WB) is supporting the Government of Indonesia to develop a programmatic response to the challenges of sustainable urbanization. City Planning Labs (CPL) is one such Bank Executed Technical Assistance initiative that aims to support municipal governments to build capacity for a data-driven approach to city planning, enabling the development of smart, inclusive, and sustainable cities. Given the success of the interventions in two Indonesian cities namely Kota Semarang and Kota Denpasar, CPL has received multi-year support from the Indonesia Sustainable Urbanization (IDSUN) Multi-Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) to scale-up the initiative.

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Harnessing the power of data so no child is left behind

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Data plays a crucial role in the 2030 agenda set out by the Sustainable Development grid_titleGoals (SDGs). It helps us to focus policies and make better decisions. It is needed to set targets, measure progress towards those targets and to hold governments accountable to their commitments under the SDGs.

Data is also essential for governments to fulfill their pledge to leave no one behind in the SDGs; that the goals should be met for all segments of society and that those furthest behind should be reached first. Despite significant progress over the last few years, we are still far away from being able to systematically identify those at risk of being left behind or to monitor their progress towards the 2030 commitments.

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Financial innovation and additionality: The power of economic analysis and data analytics

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As public and private financial institutions innovate and expand the range of financFinancial Educationial products that households and firms use, questions about how these services are affecting consumers, providers, and the economy as a whole have become central. A new policy brief by Abraham, Schmukler, and Tessada explores how evaluating the “additionality” of financial services can help answer such questions.

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Report: Women, Business and the Law 2019- A Decade of Reform

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Women, Business and the Law measures global progress toward gender equality in the Women, Business and the Law 2019law. Topic notes and related research provide further analysis of the data. To gain new insight into how women’s employment and entrepreneurship choices are affected by legal gender discrimination, this study examines ten years of Women, Business and the Law data through an index structured around economic decisions women make as they go through different stages of their working lives.

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eC2: Air Quality Management in Vietnam, Air Emission Sectoral Data Verification

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Deadline: 27-May-2019 at 11:59:59 PM (Eastern Time – Washington D.C.) index

The scope of work described here focuses on the verification of the modelling data that has been used and subsequently additional collection and validation of activity data and characteristics for key emission sources at the regional level of larger Hanoi region. This work shall be done mostly in close cooperation with Hanoi and secondly in cooperation with MONRE and Bac Ninh and Hung Yen. The objective of the assignment under this Terms of Reference is to assess and collect the data gaps and propose the best set of regionally attributed activity data for the key sources of air pollution in the different sectors. The final datasets shall be suitable for incorporation in the Vietnam GAINS model and discussed and consulted with IIASA, CEMM, MONRE, Hanoi, Bac Ninh and Hung Yen and their respective Department of Natural Resources and Environment (DONRE) as well as World Bank. The World Bank will support and facilitate the consultations with MONRE, Hanoi, Bac Ninh and Hung Yen.

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Feeling Ambivalent on International Women’s Day

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On the eve of International Women’s Day, I was at a UN WOMEN side event in NYC whenchart_image my phone started buzzing with well wishes for a happy women’s day from my friends in Asia, filling me with — ambivalence. To be honest, the day always leaves me with mixed feelings: despite the great strides that the world has made in women’s rights in various ways, for me, it’s also a reminder of how so many women still don’t enjoy our basic human rights.

As we’ve returned from women’s day to what in many ways is still a man’s world, I wanted to share three thoughts about the intersection of women’s rights with our data world today.

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Innovations in satellite measurements for development

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Combinatorial innovation is driving innovation in satellite-based economic 1*RyJ8BUGJ-wjbiQzjUiOASwmeasurements at unprecedented resolution, frequency and scale. Increasing availability of satellite data and rapid advancements in machine learning methods are enabling a better understanding into the fundamental forces shaping economic development.

Why satellite data innovations matter

The desire of human beings to “think spatially” to understand how people and objects are organized in space has not changed much since Eratosthenes — the Greek astronomer best known as the “father of Geography” — first used the term “Geographika” around 250 BC. Centuries later, our understanding of economic geography is being propelled forward by new data and new capabilities to rapidly process, analyze and convert these vast data flows into meaningful and near real-time information

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Data for development impact: Why we need to invest in data, people and ideas

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High quality development data is a must for development impact shutterstock_1109960660

We know that high quality development data is the foundation for meaningful policy-making, efficient resource allocation, and effective public service delivery. Unfortunately, even as new technology makes more data and wider uses of data possible, there are still many blank spaces on the global data map. A paper by my colleague Umar Serajuddin et al. (2015) describes this phenomenon as “data deprivation”, finding that as of just a few years ago, 77 countries still lacked the data needed to adequately measure poverty. What’s worse, data is often most scarce in the areas where it is most desperately needed. For one, the scarcity of individual-level data on issues like assets and consumption severely curtails our ability to make decisions to reduce gender disparities. Similarly, despite the urgency of the need to manage climate risk, significant voids remain with regards to climate data, such as impacts on freshwater resources. Education, health, food security, and infrastructure are just a few of the many other areas where more and better data is needed to deliver progress.

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