The role of the global development community in the data revolution

WASHINGTON — During a recent stint in India, Priya Jaisinghani Vora, CEO of Future State, focused on the country’s unique approach to privacy and data. The stated goal of the initiative she leads, which is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, is “to ensure the data revolution helps the world’s poor gain access to new services and information that can improve their lives.” Vora said her time in India — where the government is pushing a number of technological tools that make it easier for individuals to manage and leverage their data — underscored both the benefits and risks of data for development. “I think we’re just starting to understand the repercussions of data and what it means for companies and governments to know so much about us,” she said when she addressed the crowd of 1,000 global development professionals during the morning plenary of Devex World. “Data has to now be on our agenda. Specifically, we should be asking ourselves as development organizations and as companies: What’s the data that we’re collecting on people and do they know it? And consent of course is not enough. “Or we should be asking if we have the data wrong are there systems in place for disputing that data and rectifying that data? Or another one I think is really important for us is, if we are collecting data and analyzing data about people and not serving their needs, can they take their data elsewhere and go to someone who can?” The next steps the global development community takes will be critical in determining whether this data revolution carves new pathways out of poverty, or makes those who are disenfranchised become even more so, she said. Data was a major focus Devex World, a conference focused on the future of global development that Devex convened in Washington, D.C., on June 12. The event outlined some of the ways the global development community can maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of data for development. Devex World opened with Shivani Siroya, the founder and CEO of Tala, a Los Angeles based mobile technology startup that is leveraging data to provide financial identities to customers in developing countries. “It’s not about the data itself, but it’s about the stories behind the data, and how do we understand the context of people’s daily lives through that information,” she told Devex in a follow-up interview backstage. The Tala app gathers thousands of data points for each customer, forms a financial identity for them within five seconds, then uses mobile money or other payment gateways to send capital their way. Siroya pushes back on the term “data driven”, explaining that her team is mission driven but data informed. Devex World was filled with examples of ways data can drive better outcomes — for example, as Zambia gets closer to malaria elimination, data visualizations can help track the disease in order to get ahead of it. “As they get closer to elimination, they need better precision in terms of being able to understand how and when and where they need to allocate their scarce resources,” said Neil Myrick, head of the Tableau Foundation, who gave a TED-style talk on several ways data is driving progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. “They used to have data meetings every June to talk about the data and decide how they needed to make program adjustments. Well today they have data meetings every Thursday. Because if you want to stop an infectious disease and you want to use data, the information about the disease has to travel faster than the disease itself,” said Myrick. The people using the visualizations must also be involved in building them, Myrick explained, saying that data is ultimately about people: “It’s about informing people so people can use that information to make better decisions.” “If you want to stop an infectious disease and you want to use data, the information about the disease has to travel faster than the disease itself.” --— Neil Myrick, head of the Tableau Foundation The days of governments or NGOs demanding that people use systems they had no input in developing, Myrick said, need to be over. Meanwhile, Vora warned that ethics are an important consideration for companies entering countries and collecting data that could be abused. “It’s this paradox, where on the one hand you think about those who are not financially rich but who are data rich [and] have the opportunity to use their data to access the financial sector or the formal markets, but it’s exactly those same people who are probably most vulnerable to having their data used against them,” she said before the audience at Devex World. While Facebook has emerged as an important partner for the global development community, it has also faced a string of scandals pointing to the risk of people having their data used without their knowledge or consent. And as the social media giant and other tech companies increase data protection, there is a unique opportunity for a serious conversation on responsible data sharing between the private and public sector. “We're going to be even more careful than we were previously about organizations we partner with,” said Ebele Okobi, head of public policy for Facebook in Africa. Okobi spoke in a panel on the data revolution track at Devex World about some of the ways the company has leveraged data on its platform for efforts in global health and humanitarian response, mentioning a partnership with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control on meningitis, and emphasizing the role that partnerships will play particularly in high-risk areas. “Yes, we value partnerships with global organizations, but we also recognize as a team in Africa that a lot of local organizations do a lot of the on the ground grunt work and don’t get a lot of support, so we're interested in partnering broadly but we're even more interested across Africa in partnering with locally-run, locally-led organizations,” she said. Sitting beside Okobi was Toyin Saraki, healthcare philanthropist and founder of Wellbeing Foundation Africa, and wife of Nigeria’s Senate president. She recalled the year 2004, when the country had birth records and death records but no records explaining why so many women were dying in childbirth and so many newborns failed to make it past age one. “I wanted to do something about it. So I invested in health records. Not only did I want data, and the detail within the data, I wanted data that actually reached the person I was trying to help which was the mother,” Saraki said. When it comes to the way data factors into her own work on maternal, newborn, and child health, it is all about agency: Making sure this information ends up in the hands of people who will benefit from it. In an interview that was part of the innovating at scale track at Devex World, Gargee Ghosh, director of global policy and strategy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explained why delivery science needs to be just as innovative as product development science, and explained to Devex backstage that the key to data is not just the product — but the delivery and making sure it gets in the right hands. “One of the questions we think about a lot is: What is the nature of evidence that is helpful to policymakers as they make tradeoffs?” she told Devex. “We have conversations with our team on ways to create a policy capacity in ministries so they are weighing the pros and cons of different approaches to any program whether its ag[ricultural] extension work or community health work.” Whether it be mothers, health workers, or ministers, by involving the people they aim to serve in the collection and analysis of data, the global development community can “drive better ownership of the data and less donorship of the data,” said Paul Weisenfeld, executive vice president of international development at RTI, on the data revolution panel. He also referenced a quote from Sir Winston Churchill, that “statistics are like a drunk with a lamppost: Used more for support than illumination,” and said the global development community needs to make sure it does not use data in the same way. "We have to move from thinking project design is a blueprint, that we follow like a construction blueprint, to something that's more like a template that we're adjusting over time — and funders have to adjust their mentality around that,” Weisenfeld continued. Neelima Grover, CEO of QED Group, took the stage at the data revolution session to talk about how organizations can leverage data for monitoring and evaluation and learning. “What's the point of M&E if you don’t do the L?” she said. “My message to everyone here is that I think we should all make a movement towards data, because data can be really empowering.” As data becomes a focus across the global development community, there is a risk that those who go uncounted remain underserved. “How can we use data to promote equity?” asked Lisha McCormick, chief operating officer at Last Mile Health, which works with health ministries to mobilize community health workers and serve hard to reach communities. Joining Okobi, Saraki, and Weisenfeld onstage, she applauded Liberia, which has been the focus for Last Mile Health, for the way it has developed, designed, and deployed community based health information systems that feed into the national health information system, explaining that all too often data systems are designed for the average and not the outlier. “Equity means equity and inclusion of areas of data that were previously outliers, or siloed, or not integrated in ways decision makers are using information to figure out who counts and who doesn’t,” she said. Providing a perspective from the audience, Protik Basu, who is starting a sustainable investment fund focused on the SDGs, asked about a tension he sees between “rapid but perhaps imperfect and less rapid and perhaps more accurate” sources of data for impact measuring and monitoring. Referring back to the point Tala’s Siroya made earlier in the day, that the key is in the stories behind the data, McCormick talked about the importance of applying a critical eye to those stories, saying that investors often bring up the need for confidence in the numerator and denominator of any particular activity. “The natural tendencies in the digital world are not necessarily in favor of the individual and certainly not the low-income individual,” Vora of Future State told Devex in a follow-up call after Devex World. She called on organizations considering ways to leverage data for their work to ponder what data is valuable and what data is sensitive and how to protect it — rather than assuming that data is a consequence of actions. “There is a lot of nonsense going around about how poor people don’t care about their privacy, or poor people don’t know how to give consent, but there’s a way to get the perspectives of these communities into a more informed debate. “I think the development community has a unique opportunity to shed lights on the views and preferences and capabilities of the poor,” she said.