AidData Summer Fellows Empower Organizations to Use Data for Change
In June 2014, twenty-one student researchers from seven universities traveled to Nepal, Uganda, Timor-Leste, Senegal, and Mexico to serve as AidData Summer Fellows. The fellows worked with twelve different local organizations- including universities, think tanks, government line ministries, and civil society groups- to equip them to leverage geocoded data to solve development challenges in their own communities, through program planning, advocacy, and research. They worked on diverse projects ranging from developing a GIS course for a Master’s curriculum program at Kathmandu University, to testing ways to use geocoded data in crowdsourcing citizen feedback on development projects with UNICEF Uganda.
While AidData’s fellows worked with a variety of different host organizations on a range of projects, they shared a common objective: empowering local organizations. The College of William and Mary was represented by fellows Clay Harris, Peter Colwell, Samuel Brecker, Lauren Harrison, Justin DeShazor, Robert Marty, and Rebecca Schectman. Their work was sponsored by funding from the William and Mary Roy R. Charles Center and through AidData’s partnership with USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network. Read about four of these fellows’ experiences below.
Thoughts from Sam Brecker (’15) about his experience in Timor-Leste
“Seeds of Life (SoL) is an organization working jointly with the Timor-Leste Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the Australian Government to improve food security. SoL does this by increasing accessibility to improved crop varieties, thus, increasing the yields produced for farmers. Since starting work with SoL as an AidData Summer Fellow, I have helped with their newest project of visualizing climate and soil data on Google Earth. Working across different operating systems, GIS programs, spoken and computer languages, I have visualized raster and vector data by displaying indicators from predicted rainfall and temperature to soil pH and texture, which all influence growing conditions in Timor-Leste. I have learned about the technology of SoL’s weather stations and the varying climatic factors across Timor-Leste. I not only held trainings on Google Earth and GIS for staff at the main office in Dili, but I also showed SoL and Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries researchers how these technologies can benefit them. Furthermore, some of this data will be shared with policymakers to aid in their decision-making.”
Thoughts from Lauren Harrison (’14) about her experience in Timor-Leste
“When I arrived in Timor-Leste, I expected that my job at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries would be more or less an extension of my experience at AidData, only with more exotic scenery (no offense, Williamsburg). However, as I began to discuss the project with staff at Seeds of Life, the need for offline spatial data became a very real, very new challenge. Since then, I have leveraged new skills in HTML scripting, data management, and Google apps, working to generate interactive point data on climate and soils that can be accessed completely off-grid using Google Earth. In addition to overcoming the issue of connectivity, in some cases these data have been literally locked away from the public in access databases and hard copy. Over the past month, I've been to the national archives to look at weather records from the time of both Portuguese and Indonesian occupations, and mapped soil records previously confined to a Portuguese volume from the 1970s. With these new offline resources in hand, we have now begun to build capacity to use and maintain these data by sharing our methods with ALGIS, a GIS research unit at the TImor-Leste Ministry of Agriculture, and preparing materials to launch trainings at Seeds of Life Research Stations out in the field. During my time at AidData, I've come to appreciate the power of data to shape the way development programs are planned and evaluated. To that end, facing the challenge to provide information that is both accessible and actionable is a work in progress. Working with Seeds of Life in Timor-Leste has broadened my perspective, as we continue to find new ways to connect stakeholders with relevant data, be it in a jungle or an office.”
Thoughts from Justin DeShazor (’15) about his experience in Uganda:
“This summer, I worked to support Transparency International-Uganda’s Action for Transparency program in Uganda. While anti-corruption advocates have long aimed to improve access to high-quality government budget data, a top-down information exchange is not enough to deter corruption. An effective monitoring program requires an open, productive interaction between civil society and those able to ‘ground-truth’ information and provide context. Action for Transparency finds ways to complete this feedback loop. For organizations in Uganda and elsewhere that seek to affect change by shaping public discourse and policy, data visualization tools are invaluable because they enable a broad base of stakeholders, including decision-makers, to interact with key information and ask probing questions with greater ease. Geospatial technologies, in particular, show promise for Transparency International to leverage its crowdsourced corruption data with greater force and advocate for responsible governance more effectively. While we may not be able to ‘decree today that there will be no corruption,’ as stated by Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi, GIS can be another tool in the struggle against it.”
Thoughts from Rebecca Schectman (’16) about her experience in Uganda:
“As part of AidData’s ongoing research on crowd-sourced data, I was part of a team focusing on U-report, UNICEF’s tool to hear citizen feedback using free SMS text messages. We piloted a project this summer on how U-report data might lead to better decisions made by local government. To hear perspectives from outside of Kampala, I traveled to Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader, three districts in northern Uganda, and met with district officials and members of several Youth Coalitions. Overall, we aim to create easily understood reports to facilitate the use of citizen feedback through U-report. At AidData and UNICEF, we believe this will lead to better development outcomes through better planning and increased accountability at all levels of government.”
These fellows are now heading home after spending the summer working to improve the capacity of civil society organizations in developing countries to use geocoded data. You can read more about our 2014 summer fellows and their host organizations here and see some of their photos here. Be on the lookout for fellows’ reflections on their experiences abroad in our blog.
By Katie Paulson-Smith, AidData Special Assistant to Co-Executive Director