This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This article was taken from the preview of The WIRED World in 2016. In November, WIRED publishes its fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Here's a small selection of what to expect.
Here's what everybody's doing on a typical evening in our house: my son Rory is listening to the Ed Sheeran station on Pandora, my daughter Phoebe is reading a John Green book that Amazon recommended to her, and I'm perusing my personalised newsfeed on Flipboard. These sites run on troves of data, and we rely on them to make our lives better, faster and cheaper. So I get frustrated sometimes because my field of global development isn't taking full advantage of the power of data.
Netflix knows what movies I like. Tesco knows exactly what needs restocking on its shelves and when. But in development, we still rely primarily on educated guesses. Luckily, we're getting better.
In the year 2000, every country in the world agreed on a list of 15-year objectives, the Millennium Development Goals, with specific targets -- reducing child mortality by two-thirds, for example. In order to track progress and build on it, we needed data on how many people were dying and why. So countries started working harder to collect it.
Those 15 years are now up, and many of the goals have been reached, including the child mortality target. The next step is to adopt a further set of aims, and the United Nations has just done that. But to meet the new Sustainable Development Goals we're going to need even better data, and more of it, which is where my prediction comes in.
The year 2016 will mark a sea change in how developing countries harness the true power of data to change their citizens' lives.
A couple of examples show how it will happen. First, family planning. Until recently, developing countries have tended to conduct national health surveys every five years or so. That means that in 2015, a government trying to give women the right kind of sex education and the right kind of contraceptives, in the right places, has to make assumptions based on data from 2010.
But a new smartphone-based data system called Performance Monitoring and Accountability 2020 (PMA2020) has started giving governments a better version of this information every six to 12 months. In addition to collecting more data more frequently, PMA2020 also cuts in half the time it takes to analyse the data, so insights reach decision-makers faster.
Governments have begun to act on what they're learning. The Uganda Health Ministry, for example, found from its surveys that younger people weren't using family planning services. As a result, the government made reaching them a top priority in its national family planning strategy. (And PMA2020 adjusted its survey to uncover the key misconceptions that prevented young people from using contraception.) Instead of waiting five years to find out whether and how that outreach is working, Ugandan leaders will know within a year.
Another example is women farmers. Women do around 50 per cent of the farming in developing countries. Although they work just as hard, and often harder, than men, they tend to get lower yields. We've never been able to figure out why -- until now, because the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is finally giving us answers.
Women farmers in different countries face common obstacles -- too little financial credit, not enough control over the money they earn and exclusion from social organisations, for example - but it turns out that the proportions of those obstacles are different in different places. The biggest obstacle faced in Liberia, for example, is that they have too little authority to make decisions about how they're going to farm. But in Nepal, it's that too many non-farming duties fall on their shoulders in addition to their already hard work of farming.
Based on the WEAI data, leaders in Bangladesh are running a pilot programme to find out which ways of working with Bangladeshi women farmers do the most good in certain areas of the country. This will benefit everybody, by the way; women aren't only farmers, they're also the carers of farm families. If they can grow more food and earn more money, they will invest in things like education and health that lead to a better future. The data will help start this cycle.
I know some people think data is boring. And global development still has a lot of catching up to do. Maybe my prediction for 2017 will be that development organisations will start coming up with better acronyms. But you know what isn't boring? Saving people's lives. And the richer our troves of data, the more lives we can save.
2016 is the year we're going to start getting it.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
