The Global Partnership for Suitable Development Data (GPSDD) announced one of the biggest initiatives to support collaborative data innovations. 400 applications were summited and after a very close decision, 10 projects will be piloted with the support of the World’s Bank Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building (TFSCB). All ten proposals have a strong background in data production, dissemination and use, most of them aiming to try their approaches in low and middle-income countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

The diversity of selected projects covers all kind of innovations, water level monitoring and alert using telecommunication networks, utilising satellite waves to detect illegal fishing and counter human traffic, improving vital registration for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, predictive machine learning methodology to help aid workers foresee patients’ behaviour, etc. Read the complete list here.

Within the selected projects, the Netherlands Red Cross in partnership with Malawi Red Cross Society and CartONG will launch an initiative to use building collaborative data to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on Health and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). This innovation will be tested in Malawi and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Malawi Red Cross volunteer working in the field collecting data using his mobile phone

The Malawi Red Cross Society volunteer working in the field collecting data using his mobile phone

The objective is to make better health and WASH decisions and interventions using data collaboration between development and humanitarian actors, academia, government and digital volunteers. To start building and strengthening information bridges between all these organisations, collaborative digital tools and dashboards will be used. The project builds on open data and open source technologies, to facilitate interaction among involved parties.

One of the highlighted innovations of the project is identifying with partners the best practices for data collection for WASH and Health data, and to agree on common standards and tools to collect these data collaboratively. The expected outcome is to facilitate the availability of new data sources and an increased data literacy of the stakeholders.

The project will be supported by 510, the Netherlands Red Cross initiative for smart use of data to make humanitarian aid faster and more (cost)effective. Find out more about 510 here. For the next 18 months, you will certainly hear more about all these innovations, which will improve by learning from successes and failure and start shaping the future of humanitarian response.