Data innovation

“The innovations resulting from the creative new uses of data could prove to be one of the most life-changing events of this era for everyone.” World Development Report 2021: DATA FOR BETTER LIVES.

At Oxford Policy Management, we have over 40 years of experience advising and assisting governments and donor agencies on collecting and using data for the public good. In the Data Innovation team, we bring the newest methodological advances in Data Science for Development to this task.  

We work across the data cycle:  

• Data collection: whether scraping social media and news media from the internet, obtaining satellite data, collating text data from PDFs, or collecting meta-data from telecommunication devices, we ensure that projects have the right data at the right point in time.  
• Data management: we build online data management systems and pipelines so that these can feed into analytical procedures. When needed, we make use of cloud and virtual computing to wrangle very large datasets.  
• Data analysis: we use Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Geospatial Modelling, and Artificial Intelligence techniques to make sense of the new Data Ecosystem. We combine these methods with well-established Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) approaches at OPM to add robustness to our work, such as for example in causal inference or qualitative evaluations.  
• Dissemination: we build user-friendly and impactful interactive data visualisations and dashboards that are safe, secure, and easily shareable, so that we can maximise the impact of our analytical work.  

We advise clients on how to navigate a rapidly changing data ecosystem and combine these capabilities with OPM’s deep domain knowledge across a variety of policy areas in order to deliver the best impactful results for our clients.