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In collaboration with Google Health, we contributed to the COVID-19 Open Data Repository. The project is one of the most comprehensive collections of up-to-date COVID-19 related information. Comprising data from more than 20,000 locations worldwide, it contains a rich variety of data types to help public health professionals, researchers, policymakers and others in understanding and managing the virus.
The project was made possible by a remarkable team of big hearted and selfless volunteers who have worked tirelessly on top of their many life commitments (school, work, family, etc.) to attempt the compilation of the world’s largest epidemiological data base. This work has gone into vaccine research, helped governments decide public policy, and guide travel safety measures amongst many other things. The work has been used by many organizations such as the WHO/Covax, The World Bank, IMF, Harvard University Research, USAID, and Verily just to name a few international organizations. The project was awarded a $50,000 grant from Google Health in 2021.
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Research conducted by Wilson Macpherson. Read the full report here.
The purpose of this report is to understand the barriers that returning citizens face in order to begin brainstorming possible solutions for these problems. These problems stem from what I have gathered through interviews with returned citizens and cover a wide scope of issues. The report found eight distinct barriers:
Read the full report here. Google Sheets here.
Executive Summary
In partnership with FinMango, our Student Entrepreneurs for Economic Development (SEED) at the University of Virginia team gathered, framed, and analyzed key economic data indicators for Nigeria. The following pages document our approach to collecting relevant data, structuring this data within our chosen indicators, and reporting the significant Nigerian data collection obstacles.
Given the difficulties associated with the international reporting disparities and economic effects of the pandemic, our team encountered several challenges in enacting our data collection methodology process. These namely include:
1. A decentralized reporting system of COVID-19 data,
2. An often obsolete selection of data for certain Nigerian states, and
3. An insufficient platform of reporting institutions, leading to scattered results.
Our procedure and resulting analysis reaffirm FinMango’s mission to collect and present data of the pandemic’s effects on the economics of various African countries. The analysis and resulting impacts of this effort remain bold and relevant given the uneven effect of the pandemic on various developing countries across the world. Through advocating for centralized reporting and achieving efficient automation of data collection, FinMango can extrapolate this methodology for other global regions, including Latin America and Asia Pacific.
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Read the full report here.
In concluding the report, one could summarize the findings by stating that while, overall, Latin America has faced significant advances in the area of financial inclusion, there is still a disparity between lower classes and the middle and upper classes in terms of access and ability to use financial instruments. Their advances also seem to be extremely dependent on financial scenarios, and due to the economic and political instability in the region, setbacks seem to occur quite often (as seen from 2014 to 2017). Using the analysis of Argentina and Brazil as illustrations of the region, their main challenge still seems to be high levels of inequality and lack of financial literacy, which means main policies need to be able to target lower income portions of the population. While higher income portions of the population seem financially literate and able to use financial instruments and participate in the system, lower income portions of the population seem to face high interest rates and lack of access to low cost institutions which discourage their participation in the system. The region has expressed, however, that it intends to tackle the issue with recent policies being put into place which are just starting to look effective.
