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Claire Melamed on Data, Power and Sustainable Development

January 10, 2024
For this podcast, I sat down a few months ago to discuss data and development with Claire Melamed, who runs the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Apologies for delay, Claire – got caught up in internal traffic. Also apologies for length of this transcript – turns out 30m talking = 2 blog length pieces. Duncan: Like any good Englishman,
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Five ways to have better data after COVID-19

May 13, 2020
Guest post by Dr. Claire Melamed, CEO of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Most of the time data is a boring backdrop to the real stuff that people care about: will my child get into university with those grades? Which party is likely to win at the next election? Who will win the World Cup? Most people are
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How Data Analytics can Unlock the Knowledge in Development Organisations

December 6, 2017
Guest blog by Itai Mutemeri (@tyclimateguy) is Head of Analytics at London based Senca Research In September 2017, I headed up to the Oxfam head office in Oxford to present our research paper: Big Data Opportunities for Oxfam – Text Analytics. Like all good research titles, it’s a mouthful.  The paper explored the potential application of text analytics in response
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Should the Gates Foundation Do Data Differently?

November 8, 2017
Spent a fascinating day last week talking to staff at the Gates Foundation at its HQ in a cold, grey and sleety Seattle (felt quite at home). I presented the book in one of those ‘brownbag lunches’ that Americans love (although these days ‘clear plastic box lunches’ would be more accurate), and we then got on to discussing the implications
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The Power of Data: how new stats are changing our understanding of inequality

March 15, 2017
Every Saturday my colleague Max Lawson, who’s Oxfam’s global inequality policy lead, sends round an email entitled ‘Some short reading for the weekend if you fancy it’. This week was particularly good, so I just lifted it: This year has already been good for the improvement in data availability on inequality, with the launch of the Wealth and Incomes Database
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What do we know about when data does/doesn’t influence policy?

March 8, 2017
Josh Powell, Chief Strategy Officer at the Development Gateway weighs in on the Data and Development debate While development actors are now creating more data than ever, examples of impactful use are anecdotal and scant. Put bluntly, despite this supply-side push for more data, we are far from realizing an evidence-based utopia filled with data-driven decisions. One of the key
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Doing Data Differently: Lessons from the Results Data Initiative

December 2, 2016
Guest post from Dustin Homer, Director of Engagement and Partnerships at Development Gateway Development folks see magical possibilities for data-driven decision-making. We want data and evidence to improve our work—to help us reach marginalized people, allocate budgets effectively, and see which activities work the best. And it’s not all buzz; we’re getting serious about investing real resources into this development
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The Politics of Data – the bit the geeks forget?

October 23, 2015
Had a really thought-provoking conversation with Dustin Homer of Development Gateway last week. Development Gateway was originally set up inside the World Bank, then spun off as an independent tech organisation, and focuses on helping governments and international organizations make better use of data in their decision-making. So far, so technocratic, but Dustin got in touch because he read my
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Creating a splash with Data Diving

August 30, 2013
Over a July weekend in London four charities and more than 80 data professionals took part in a “DataDive”, organized by DataKind UK. Ricardo, Richard and Simone from Oxfam’s Research Team (see pic of handsome hunks below) went along. Here’s what happened. If you came to London for a weekend during the best summer since 1976, how would you like
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Fun with data: the history of the world 1960-2008, and you’re in charge

August 24, 2010
I just spent a happy half hour playing with this – the first of many, I suspect. It’s the latest version of the Hans Rosling/Gapminder graphs that I’ve blogged on before and this one is really user friendly – even I can get it to work. Just click here to start messing around. It allows you to construct a graph
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