USAID/E3 Making Data More Accessible
Sarah Lane, the Activity Lead for the Office of Economic Policy in USAID’s E3 Bureau, struggled for years with the fact that the Agency had “so much amazing project level data out there,” including her office’s project cost benefit analyses (CBAs), but no central repository. In Lane’s experience, the Agency tended to collect vast amounts of project data, but most sat in Excel files on individual employees’ desktops and remained inaccessible to other colleagues, decision makers, and outside researchers. As the E3 Bureau transitioned from managing economic growth mechanisms to producing high quality, in-house economic analysis, Lane noted that her office struggled to find a way to make data accessible in ways that were useful to decision-makers.
When she heard about the Learning Improvement Projects from a former colleague, who was also a member of USAID’s knowledge sharing Community of Practice called “SILK” (Sharing Insights, Learning, and Knowledge), Lane thought it would be a perfect opportunity to address this challenge. She proposed the creation of a dashboard for project data which could be easily viewed, analyzed, aggregated and disaggregated. “I thought, let’s start small,” Lane reflected. “We have all this information…we’re going to put the data in this one spot so people can look at it.”
Unexpected Challenges
As it turned out, submitting her Learning Improvement Project proposal was the easy part. “For me, the bigger process was figuring out, is this doable? Does a system already exist that has this capability? Is the Agency ready for something like this? This was the thought process after we got the money [and] these bigger issues came up.” The process was made even more complicated by the announcement of the President’s Open Data Initiative, which mandated that the Agency devise its own system to collect and organize data for public use. While she praised the initiative, Lane recalled that suddenly, “there was no reason to continue” creating a whole separate system for project-level data, “so we focused on the CBAs…we’re always getting asked to see the analyses…so we still ha[d] a big need to make these public.”
Reflecting on the learning cycle, Lane emphasized the project’s role in knowledge organization. “That’s something we’ve been trying to do in our office for about a year,” Lane explained. Previously, the office had consulted with the Millennium Challenge Corporation and others who had already made their data public to see how it was done. “We’re definitely in the organization phase,” Lane said, “especially because there’s a huge clearance process—we have to make sure that the Missions are OK with making the information public.” Once the CBA data are shared, Lane imagines that they could be used in countless ways. In an important caveat, Lane noted that measuring knowledge use as a component of the learning cycle is tricky—although her office may be able to determine where people downloaded the data, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to determine how it was being used. Nevertheless, Lane is undeterred. “I’m so passionate about trying to get it out,” she said. “It’s a slow process, but there’s a lot that could be done.”
Lessons Learned
Lane’s biggest challenge had to do with the “big gap in terms of knowing what systems already exist.” She and her colleagues looked into several systems to determine if they were the right one. In the end, “the one we actually stumbled upon, we found by luck. Someone in my office had a meeting with the GeoCenter to see if they could map out our data, and their system for global health was similar to what we wanted.” Lane partnered with the GeoCenter and is currently exploring how their current data storage and mapping system can support her office’s own goals to make CBA data accessible to a wider audience.
Still, she doesn’t necessarily think the problem of “knowing what’s out there” has been solved. In Lane’s opinion, advising and providing access to tools that already exist could be a role for the PPL Bureau. “In our case,” she explained, “it was useful to have the discussions with PPL about the systems that already exist out there—should we make something totally new? Or should we use something that already exists?” Lane feels that PPL’s unique position in connecting across the whole Agency is “very useful. If someone managed that process to get our information out so it could be used by the people who need it, it would be fantastic,” Lane said. “Data is just so powerful…we spend all the time, effort, and money to collect it, and then we don’t use it…if we could somehow just bite off some small pieces and see what it could do, I think it could be really powerful.” Lane believes other people in the Agency could learn from her office’s experience and undergo a similar assessment of data sharing systems, but emphasized the importance of starting small, addressing clearance issues at every level to make the data public, and then thinking through where to house the data to ensure that it is accessible. The Presidential mandate has helped to facilitate this process, Lane commented, “but we’re not there yet.”
What is a Learning Improvement Project?
This activity is part of USAID’s Learning Improvement Projects, funded by PPL’s Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research, and supported by the KDMD project. These activities aim to catalyze Agency learning by sharing lessons from innovative projects with the hope that promising approaches can be replicated and scaled up by others for greater impact.