The proliferation of open data and big data has significant implications for how we think about Canada’s role in international development and our engagement with developing countries.
In April 2015, the Canadian International Development Platform (CIPD), which started as an initiative of the former North South Institute, was re-launched as part of a new partnership that involves Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The goal of the CIDP is to leverage the proliferation of open data and big data, both in Canada and beyond, to provide a comprehensive picture of Canada’s engagement with developing countries. To this end, the platform tracks flows including (but not limited to) foreign aid, trade, investment, migration and remittances between Canada and developing countries. It also provides on-demand analytics, research and data visualization solutions. The key audiences of the platform include Canadian civil society, researcher and analysts, the media, as well as public and private sector practitioners working on Canada’s engagement with emerging and developing economies.
“There is a lot of development data out there – freely available and ready to use,” said Aniket Bhushan, adjunct research professor in NPSIA and founder of the CIPD. “A key challenge is for many stakeholders is making sense of this information and knowing what data are best for which purposes. The CIDP aggregates, analyzes and visualizes a range of development data, including Canadian open aid data, making it easier to search, analyze and access.
“Beyond data analytics, the goal of the CIDP is to provide a platform for stakeholders to come together around important discussions such as the conversation we have started on leveraging open data in development in the Canadian context and the future of monitoring and evaluation.”
On March 31, 2014, the CIDP team at NPSIA, in partnership with the Aga Khan Foundation Canada and the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, organized a half-day workshop with Canadian civil society stakeholders to examine how organizations are working with international development data, what challenges they face and what aspects of development data Canadian stakeholders would like on in the future.
“There are a lot of possibilities for collaboration between Canadian civil society organizations (CSOs) and NPSIA going forward – on monitoring and evaluation and harnessing open development data,” said Shannon Kindornay, adjunct research professor with NPSIA. “This workshop serves as the start of a much longer conversation.”
Key takeaways from the event include:
- In their use of open development data, a key challenge organizations face is obtaining accurate and reliable data on a timely basis to support programming and impact analysis
- Organizations recognized the need to improve data management systems, collect qualitative as well as quantitative information and make sense of information for different audiences, including funders, partners and the general public
- Going forward, CSOs would like to engage in further opportunities with peers to discuss how monitoring and evaluation systems, as well as data management, can be improved through better quality assurance and standardization in data collection
- CSOs highly value the CIPD and welcomed the new and improved version that has been launched. They see it playing an important role in contributing to timely analysis on Canada’s engagement with the developing world
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