Data for Development
Project leads: Ian Coady
Team: Attila Lazar, Chris Nnanatu, Heather Chamberlain, Sarchil Qader, Assane Gadiaga, Aubrey Steingraber, Sada Saxton, Alexandra Frosch
Funding: UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)
Start: Nov 2023
Completion: Mar 2025
This programme is funded through the FCDO’s Global Statistics team and brings together a number of implementing partners working on improving the availability and quality of data for development. As well as WorldPop, other implementing partners include:
- Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD)
- PARIS21
- World Bank – Global data
- UN Statistics Division
- Flowminder
In this programme we are working to enhance decision making and accountability by improving the coverage, quality, and use of data for sustainable development. We are engaging with national governments and state-run statistical institutes to strengthen data systems, integrate innovative data, tools, and methods, and encourage a culture of evidence-based decision making.
Our team is supporting national statistical institutes to develop understanding of the value that alternative data sources such as geospatial data and earth observation can have for modernising data systems. We are assisting countries to integrate innovative tools and methods into their official statistics and are working with national statistical institutes on developing the strategic leadership needed to do this.
Project outputs include population modelling and enumeration area delineation delivered through capacity building for key data personnel in Ethiopia, Cameroon, Zambia and other low or middle-income countries. We are also assisting stakeholders in the integration of modelled population estimates into policy making, such as public health interventions, disaster preparedness or service delivery optimisation, at the country level.
About Us
The WorldPop research programme, based in the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton, is a multi-sectoral team of researchers, technicians and project specialists that produces data on population distributions and characteristics at high spatial resolution.
Initiated in October 2013 to combine The AfriPop Project, AsiaPop and AmeriPop projects, we have a diverse portfolio of projects, including large multi-million-pound collaborative projects with partner organisations, commercial data providers and international development organisations.