Bridging the Gap Between Plans and Reality: A Data-Driven Look at Urban Land Use in Amman

Case Study Veraset Urban Development

Urban landscapes are transforming rapidly, often outpacing the capabilities of traditional planning tools. In Amman, Jordan—a city shaped by swift population growth and complex migration flows—this challenge is particularly acute.

Unlocking Mapbox Data: Enhancing People’s Daily Lives through Data-Driven Urban Planning

Case Study Mapbox Urban Development Transport

Cities around the globe confront significant challenges in providing infrastructure, essential services, and access to public transportation. In response, many urban areas are striving to enhance their infrastructure to improve the daily lives of their citizens.

Health Planning in the Philippines

Case Study Mapbox Health

Access to health services is essential. However, in the Philippines, the delivery of health services is highly fragmented across different levels of administration.

Harnessing Data to Transform City Planning and Management

Case Study Waze Transport Urban Development

With the ongoing growth of the global population, cities are increasingly emerging as hubs of economic activity and innovation. However, if urbanization is not well-planned, it can result in a wide range of problems, such as traffic jams.

Assessing How Floods Affect Economic Growth – The Case of the Western Balkans

Case Study JBA Disaster Risk Management

The World Bank published the Western Balkans regional Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) that assesses natural hazard risks (linked to climate change and seismic activity) across people and places and provides specific and prioritized actions to enhance the region’s climate resilience and to stimulate economic growth.

Leveraging LinkedIn Data to Understand the Green and Digital Transformations in the Labor Market and the Future of Work

Case Study LinkedIn Jobs and Development

The economy and the labor market have evolved due to digital and green transitions. New technologies and new forms of work stemming from digitalization, climate change, and ongoing efforts to shift to a low-carbon economy have been changing jobs and skills at a rapid pace.

How to Leverage Data for Better Transport, Digital Connectivity, and Sustainable Development in the Amazon

Case Study Google Mapbox Meta OOkla Digital Development Transport

The World Bank Transport team used data from Google, Mapbox, Meta, and Ookla to identify infrastructure gaps in the Amazon areas of Brazil, Colombia and Peru.

Can private management of African protected areas improve socioeconomic and wildlife outcomes?

Case Study AtlasAI Inequality and Shared Prosperity

African governments increasingly entrust the management of protected areas to private, nongovernmental organizations, with the hope that the significant resources and technical capacities of private organizations will help realize the potential of these areas.

Advancing Women’s Empowerment Through Data

Case Study

Data plays a fundamental role in identifying the challenges women are facing and in allowing policymakers and businesses to make informed decisions that improve women’s well-being and access to economic opportunities and overall development outcomes.

Unleashing the Power of Data to Tackle Traffic Congestion and Promote Road Safety

Case Study Mapbox Mapillary Waze

As the global population is constantly increasing, building modern and sustainable cities to accommodate everyone is crucial. This is enshrined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in which the Sustainable Development Goal 11 aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Impact of the Availability of ChatGPT on Software Development Activity

Case Study GitHub Digital Development AI

Advancements in Artificial Intelligence, especially with ChatGPT, have greatly influenced software development. Leveraging novel data from GitHub Innovation Graph, the World Bank’s Data Lab hypothesized that ChatGPT improves the efficiency of software production.

Understanding Internet Connectivity to Tackle the Digital Divide

Case Study Ookla Digital Development

The Internet offers great potential for contributing to more prosperous societies. For instance, it enables small businesses to overcome the challenges of entering worldwide markets.

Understanding Socioeconomic Disparities in Mobility Behavior During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Developing Countries

Case Study Veraset Inequality and Shared Prosperity

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted global mobility, but how did it affect different socioeconomic groups, particularly in developing and middle-income countries?

Nature-Based Solutions for Climate-Resilient Urban Development in Itahari, Nepal

Case Study JBA Disaster Risk Management

Cities across Nepal are increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change impacts. Rapid, unplanned urbanization and the country’s unique topography make major cities particularly prone to floods, landslides, and heat stress.

Examining the Prevalence of Technology Skills in Central America and the Dominican Republic

Case Study LinkedIn Jobs and Development

Technological advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to shape labor markets in Central America and the Dominican Republic (CADR).

Using Mobility Data for Resilient Transport Planning and Investments

Case Study Unacast Quadrant Transport

Chennai has been facing various challenges like changes in land use patterns and urban population stress, and a growing risk from events like floods and heavy rains, which all put pressure on its transport infrastructure.

Examining the Impact of Social Distancing on Household-Level Economic Performances in Vietnam

Case Study Meta Inequality and Shared Prosperity

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments implemented social distancing measures to curb the spread of the virus. However, these measures also impacted people’s socioeconomic well-being.

Exploring the crucial role of traffic-related emissions on air pollution in Tbilisi

Case Study Waze Health

With financial support from Sweden, the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Team working in the South Caucasus was seeking to understand how exposure to pollution varies within Tbilisi, Georgia across income groups and occupations to aid policy makers in developing solutions that benefit those who are most vulnerable to pollution.

Assessing the Impact of Extreme Temperatures on Sentiments through Social Media Data in Argentina

Case Study X Health

How do extreme weather events affect people’s sentiments? Leveraging X (formerly known as Twitter) data, the World Bank’s Regional Direction of Sustainable Development for Latin America and the Caribbean worked with researchers from Argentina universities to study how extreme temperatures impact people’s moods in Argentina.

Evaluar El Impacto De Las Temperaturas Extremas En Los Sentimientos a Través De Datos De Redes Sociales En Argentina

Case Study X Salud

¿Cómo afectan los fenómenos meteorológicos extremos a los sentimientos de las personas? A partir de los datos de la red social X (antes conocido como Twitter), la Dirección Regional de Desarrollo Sostenible para América Latina y el Caribe del Banco Mundial trabajó con investigadores de universidades argentinas para estudiar cómo las temperaturas extremas impactan sobre el estado de ánimo de las personas en Argentina.

Cultivating Human Capital and Skills in Argentina for Sustainable Long-Term Economic Growth

Case Study LinkedIn Jobs and Development

Argentina holds immense potential to achieve sustained and inclusive economic growth. However, the country is facing structural challenges to growth, including the gradually declining quality of human capital.

Uncovering the Digital Divide in Brazil: Data Reveals Internet Inequality Across Income Groups

Case Study Ookla Digital Development

Leveraging data from Ookla for Good™, the World Bank’s Digital Development Global Practice has analyzed the relationship between internet speed and income inequality within a sample of Brazilian cities.

Using Mobility Data to Improve Lives in Lima

Case Study Mapbox Veraset Waze Urban Development Transport

Improving traffic flow and enhancing road safety are critical to Lima which was ranked the fourth most congested metropolitan area in the world in 2022.

Assessing Traffic Congestion and Accessibility to Jobs Using Waze for Cities and Mapbox Data

Case Study Mapbox Waze Urban Development Transport

Traffic congestion and suburbanization are becoming increasingly significant factors affecting urban mobility and limiting access to jobs and opportunities in most mid-sized cities worldwide.

Assessing Digital Transformation in Firms in Latin America and the Caribbean

Case Study LinkedIn Jobs and Development

Are firms in Latin America and the Caribbean lagging in terms of their adoption of digital technologies? The Inter-American Development Bank’s Competitiveness, Technology, and Innovation Division leveraged LinkedIn data on the penetration of digital skills as part of an assessment on the adoption of technologies in the region.

Analyzing Digital Skills Gap in MENA Countries to Inform An Upskilling Initiative

Case Study LinkedIn Jobs and Development

Digital technologies are reshaping work and traditional jobs. It is essential for workers across all sectors to acquire and strengthen their digital skills to stay competitive in the job market.

Inferring COVID-19 Vaccine Attitudes from X

Case Study X Health COVID-19

Social media has become a platform for the public to openly advocate and express their opinions on various issues including health.

Understanding Informal Trade Dynamics in Benin

Case Study Outlogic Inequality and Shared Prosperity

Benin’s trade performance has been improving gradually in the past decade. Notably, informal trade, smuggling and small-scale cross border trade (SSCBT) are part of the large unrecorded trade dynamics in this African country.

Understanding the Economic Impact of Vaccination

Case Study Meta Health

The World Bank East Asia and the Pacific Economic Update April 2022 analyzed challenges and opportunities facing the East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) region.

Maldives Development Update (April 2021): A Digital Dawn

Case Study Ookla Digital Development

Authors for the special focus topic (Part B) on digital development: Gohar Malumyan, Junko Narimatsu and Pui Shen Yoong, with guidance from Siddhartha Raja and Fernando Im.

Is El Salvador's health care system ready for telemedicine?

Case Study Ookla Health

The World Bank’s Digital Economy for Latin America (DE4LAC) initiative leveraged data from Ookla for Good™ to analyze El Salvador’s telecommunication network to understand to what extent the national healthcare system could leverage the existing digital infrastructure and develop e-health applications.

Insights from Leveraging Big Data to Track the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Mobility in Buenos Aires

Waze Transport

How did the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures affect mobility in cities around the globe? To inform transport mobility planning, congestion data provided by Waze for Cities was used for a World Bank study on how travel patterns in Buenos Aires changed as a result of pandemic-related restrictions and changing travel preferences.

Empowering Female Entrepreneurs to Cross Over into Male-Dominated Sectors

Meta Gender Jobs and Development

Female entrepreneurship is on the rise globally. However, factors such as social norms and unconscious biases are holding women back from entering more profitable male-dominated sectors.

How Big Data and Machine Learning Can Strengthen Road Safety

Case Study Mapbox Mapillary Waze Transport

High-quality and reliable data is necessary to gain useful, actionable insights and enhance road safety conditions. However, collecting data on road safety through manual detection can be expensive, time-consuming, and complex.

Why We Should Accelerate the Use of Digital Technologies in Africa

Case Study Ookla Digital Development

As Africa’s population grows, digital technologies are becoming increasingly important for the continent’s economic transformation and job creation. From computers to apps to machine learning, digital technologies offer new opportunities for people and businesses across Africa.

For Reduced Exposure to COVID-19, the Quality of Your Internet Matters

Meta Ookla COVID-19 Health Digital Development

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments-imposed movement restrictions to curb the spread of the disease. With access to the internet, people could work or study remotely, therefore making it easier for them to adhere to pandemic-related movement restrictions.

The Effects of City Growth on Traffic and Urban Mobility

Case Study Waze Disaster Risk Management Transport

The Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca has been deeply affected by urban sprawl, which has strained the city’s traffic system and caused increased congestion on roadways.

Social Norms and Gender Equality in South Asia

Case Study Meta Gender

This blog highlights recent work from a larger body of research on gender equality carried out at the World Bank. The blog itself relies on Chapter 3 of this report South Asia Economic Focus Reshaping Norms: A New Way Forward.

Buenos Aires Transport Demand Planning

Case Study Waze Transport Urban Development

Challenge The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures implemented in 2020 had a significant impact on mobility in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA), adding new constrains to the travel behaviours of residents and businesses.

Where Did Everyone Go? Potential of Digital Movement Data for Natural Hazards Management

Case Study Cuebiq Disaster Risk Management

Every September 19th since the great earthquake of 1985, Mexico City conducts a major drill: people filing out of buildings in an orderly fashion.

A Data-Driven Framework to Support Bogota’s Barrios Vitales Project

Case Study Waze Unacast Mapbox Transport

A data-driven framework to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of a superblock model in Bogotá from a speed management perspective and inform street design alternatives in the urban space.

Communicating for Health: How Did Indians Get Informed about COVID-19 during the Pandemic?

Case Study Meta Health COVID-19 Health

The COVID-19 pandemic saw an unprecedented amount of scientific information disseminated: throughout 2020, 11 research articles on COVID-19 were published every hour.

Understanding Societal Responses to Policies Undertaken During Emergencies: Lessons from COVID-19’s Second Wave in Maharashtra

Case Study Outlogic SpaceKnow Health Disaster Risk Management Urban Development COVID-19

Maharashtra, one of the wealthiest states in India, was among the worst hit by COVID-19, registering nearly 140,000 COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Visualizing Millions of Waze Traffic Alerts with BigQuery, H3 and Dask

Tutorial Waze Transport Urban Development

Waze for Cities, a Data Partner of the Development Data Partnership, connects government partners to high quality, frequent and granular traffic data extremely valuable in informing public sector, transport and urban planning as well as addressing the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Facebook’s Covid-19 Trends and Impact Survey

Meta Health COVID-19

With as many as 8 vaccines approved for use around the world the most urgent need now to control the spread of the novel coronavirus is increasing vaccination rates.

Unlocking Mobility: TapTap Maps in Cap-Haïtien

WhereIsMyTransport Transport

Challenge Haitian cities suffer from poor transportation services, and the lack of data from existing services limits improvement efforts. Tap Taps are the most popular motorized transportation mode employed across Haiti, yet there is not enough data on them as they are informal, private, and marginally regulated.

The Effect of COVID-19 Lockdown Measures on Internet Speed

Ookla Digital Development COVID-19

COVID-19 and the related lockdown measures to prevent the virus’ spread have highlighted how important it is for everyone to have access to reliable and resilient digital infrastructure.

Optimizing Tourism Investments: Identifying Chokepoints and Underperforming Minor Roads in Sri Lanka

Mapbox Transport

Challenge Connected and maintained transportation infrastructure are critical to sustainable economic development, but most current estimation methods of road quality are labor, time, and cost intensive.

Socioeconomic Impact of COVID-19 in Indonesia

Premise Health Poverty

Challenge Although there is a widespread awareness of the pandemic, there is a lack of understanding from citizens’ perspective, especially behaviors it triggers, sentiments towards government as well as rising concerns.

A Light Primer to Spark / Databricks

Tutorial

Databricks is a powerful platform for using Spark, a powerful data technology. If you’re reading this, you’re likely a Python or R developer who begins their Spark journey to process large datasets.

Estimating High-speed Broadband Coverage in Ukraine

Ookla Digital Development

Challenge Ukraine, Europe’s biggest country, has over 1,192 operators and providers, of which close to three quarters operate under a special preferential tax regime, allowing them not to report their coverage/subscription data to the national telecom regulatory authority.

2020 Inspire Challenge Finalist - The ClimaCell Locust Project

Tomorrow.io Agriculture and Food Climate Change

Ag Observatory in collaboration with the World Bank Data Lab guided and facilitated Climacell’s entry into the CGIAR Big Data Inspire Challenge 2020.

Analyzing Spatial Accessibility of Health Facilities in Indonesia and Philippines

Meta Mapbox Health Transport

Challenge: Indonesia and the Philippines are archipelagos, where geographic and administrative boundaries are similar. The collection of islands is home to different concentrations of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic groups, with an imbalanced distribution of health facilities and physicians.

Mapbox Releases a New Movement Dataset for Mobility Insights

Announcement Mapbox

Following the Development Data Partnership launch event at the World Bank-IMF Annual Meetings, Mapbox announced a new dataset on movement data for mobility insights.

Tackling COVID-19 Second Wave using Facebook Mobility Data in Vietnam

Meta Transport COVID-19

Challenge: On July 24, after 99 days of zero community-transmitted COVID-19 infections, a 57 year-old man tested positive in Danang, a major city in central Vietnam with close to 1.

Introducing the Data Partnership on GitHub

Announcement

After launching in 2019, when the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund joined the initiave, the Development Data Partnership has scaled up fast, with more than 100 projects having been brought to life supported by partnerships with more than 20 companies.

Leveraging New Data Methods to Address an Ancient Challenge: Locusts

Announcement Tomorrow.io Agriculture and Food

Challenge: The worst locust upsurge in at least 25 years is hitting parts of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and Western Asia, and over 40 million people who are already food insecure find their food supply and livelihoods threatened.

How to Find Population Movement Data for Your Country: The Mobile Location Data Inventory

Announcement Meta Veraset Unacast Cuebiq Outlogic

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, so have measures to mitigate its spread. Physical distancing and movement restrictions – such as school and workplace closures, public event cancellations, stay-at-home orders, and international and domestic travel bans – vary considerably across countries.

Google, Apple, and Facebook: Understanding Mobility during Social Distancing with Private Sector Data

Meta Google Transport

As countries around the world work to contain the spread and impact of COVID-19, the World Bank Group is moving quickly to provide fast, flexible responses to help developing countries strengthen their pandemic response and health care systems.

Addressing COVID-19 through Public-Private Data Partnerships: Where Do We Put New Testing Facilities?

Meta Mapbox Health COVID-19

Background As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, the World Bank is ramping up its response to help countries around the world. The Bank recently announced $14 billion emergency support program, for which a key pillar is to help countries strengthen their capacity to monitor and respond to the spread of the virus.

A New Predictive Model for More Accurate Electrical Grid Mapping

Meta Energy

Challenge: When planning connectivity deployments in emerging markets, it is important to have a clear picture of where existing power lines are placed.

Estimating Access to Employment Opportunities in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Mapbox Jobs and Development

Challenge: Poor transport facilities and infrastructure are a major hindrance to Bangladesh’s economic development. The road network in Dhaka is severely congested.

Tackling the Global Profitarchy–Gender and the Choice of Business Sector

Meta Gender Jobs and Development

Challenge: Despite significant progress in women’s educational attainment and higher female labor force participation rates in many countries, progress in closing the gender pay gap, which takes the ratio of median earnings of all women to all men, has been slow.

Improving Road Safety in Nairobi

Waze Transport

“Data Partnership brings domain expertise. Google brings data expertise. Together we impact real world problems.” –Google’s Bailey-Galvis noted at a Data Partnership event in early February 2019

On Responsible Data Use

As we develop the Data Partnership, we have a responsibility to the people impacted by our initiative – to local governments and partners, and to our own organizations – to think about how we are collecting, using, storing, and sharing information.

Mapping Freetown Transit for Resiliency

WhereIsMyTransport Disaster Risk Management Transport

Challenge: The resiliency of a transport network is a critical component to the stability and prosperity of a city. Freetown, prone to flooding and landslides, struggles to maintain services throughout the year.

Why Data Partnership?

Should the private sector ever share data with the public sector, even if for public good? Well, it depends. Most of us are in agreement that when companies collect our data as a natural by-product of providing a service – like our movement data or spending patterns – the company shouldn’t sell these data to a third party for profit, especially without transparency.

Data Partner Lightning Talks

Announcement

On February 13, 2019, the Data Partnership (formerly Data Collaboratives), for the first time, brought together Partners and staff. More than 200 colleagues joined the standing-room-only event, in person and online, learning about how private data partnerships can be made to work for public good.