WHY PARTNERSHIP

Public policy and provision of public infrastructure and services are heavily dependent on data – higher quality, timely data translates into more effective sector and program prioritization, design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.

Increasingly, the private sector is generating data that could be used to complement traditional public-sector data collection methods. Through public-private collaboration, in addition to generating more timely and relevant data for decision making, entirely new public good use cases could be discovered and implemented.

KEY CHALLENGES

Despite the potential benefits, there are challenges in linking the supply of proprietary data and the demand for these data for public benefit.

On the supply side, companies that have warrant to share data may not have the resources to ensure third-party analyses are performed in a secure and ethical manner. At the same time, since many applications for a company’s data may fall outside their sector expertise, and since solutions may require a combination of proprietary datasets across a range of competitors, individual companies are not necessarily well-positioned create optimal solutions to public sector challenges.

On the demand side –from academics, NGOs, governments, and international organizations – there is discord. A company may be approached daily with requests from dozens of actors. For mid-size and small companies especially, the burden of responding to this disaggregated demand can be overwhelming – processing requests, understanding needs, signing bilateral legal agreements, assigning technical staff to respond to questions, ensuring data security – all of which would be outside the scope of the company’s core business.

OPPORTUNITY

The Development Data Partnership has been designed to overcome these supply and demand challenges at scale. Specifically, the Partnership: (a) coordinates and aggregates demand on behalf of public actors; (b) links public sector challenges and domain expertise to relevant proprietary data; (c) significantly reduces the transaction costs associated with data sharing; (d) reduces duplication of effort and facilitates collaboration on development of solutions; and (e) increases transparency and accountability for integrating use of proprietary data in public good analytics.

By learning through real world project implementation, the Partnership aims to transform proprietary datasets into sustainably generated, sharable insights for improving public sector services and infrastructure.

IMPACT