FAO Datalab
The objective of the Data Lab aligns with that of FAO Statistics, which is to support the design and monitoring of evidence-based policy decisions by member countries. The Data Lab will also support the Hand-in-Hand Initiative with the objective of accelerating progress on Sustainable Development Goals in 43 focus countries with the highest poverty and hunger rates.
More in particular, the Data Lab will support the FAO's statistical system by addressing the specific challenges related to timeliness, granularity, data gaps and automation of analysis for quicker insights. To achieve these objectives, the Data Lab will:
- promote the use of non-official, unstructured data and data science methods to fill in data gaps in domains and geographical areas in which there is little official data available;
- validate official data reported by countries, to identify areas of future collaboration and technical assistance;
- identify relevant data sources and appropriate analysis techniques to produce evidence and build insights;
- develop geospatial tools and tagging systems at sub-national level, to increase data granularity, especially in tropical and dryland areas where the most vulnerable populations live;
- build data systems for the HiH Initiative that will facilitate the identification of target areas and will highlight aspects of their agricultural potential;
- provide tailored text-mining tools to extract, summarize and categorize information on effective policy interventions that can be applied in similar situations.
The Data Lab also aims at bridging gaps between different streams of work around data: it must be seen as a connecting point of different initiatives in FAO (where knowledge is shared and expanded) and beyond FAO (building partnerships at all levels). The Data Lab will provide a combination of skills depending on the needs and issues being addressed.
More information on the DataLab can be found at DataLab