C4D Network

Global community of professionals working in Communication for Development

Can big data be used for evaluation? A UN Women feasibility study (UN Women, 2018)

The objective of the study was to investigate the feasibility of leveraging big data sources—particularly Twitter, Facebook, and radio data—to improve the evaluation of gender equality and women’s empowerment initiatives. In particular, this study seeks to understand the role of big data to evaluate the contribution of UN Women to women’s political participation and leadership (WPP).

Taking Mexico and Pakistan as two case studies, which present different challenges to access of big data sources and distinct barriers to WPP, processes of accessing, analysing, and triangulating big data sources were documented with traditional data as a feasible means to provide more credible and robust insights about the effectiveness of UN Women interventions.

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Community-driven Data Collection in Informal Settlements (IIED Brief, 2017)

Around a billion urban dwellers in the global South live in informal settlements. Most of these lack basic infrastructure (including water piped to homes, good provision for sanitation, paved roads, paths and drains) and services (including schools, health care and household waste collection). In many cities in Africa and Asia, more than half of the population live in informal settlements. But there is little or no data on these settlements. Most have no street names and their residents have no addresses. Many national governments rely on national sample surveys for data on health and living conditions, and these have sample sizes too small to provide needed data for the residents of informal settlements.

This brief finds that with community-driven data collection, grassroots organisations collect relevant data to help address their needs. This can be done in various ways, for instance through surveys, participatory mapping or enumerations.

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Using Social Media Data in International Development Research, Monitoring & Evaluation (DFID Practice Note 2016)

Abstract: The global adoption of social media has seen the user base expand to an unprecedented level. Estimates put social media membership at around 2.5 billion non unique users globally, with Facebook, Google+ and Twitter accounting for over half of these. Social media data can add value to international development research, monitoring and evaluation in several ways.

These data are‘transformative’ as they are user generated in real time and produced in large volumes in contrast to the necessarily retrospective snapshots of social trends provided by conventional means such as household surveys and administrative data. As such, they can provide insight into the behaviour and opinions of specific populations that are often unreachable by conventional methods where social media uptake is high.

The examples in this pratice note show cases where social media data were available in high volume in development contexts. However,it is important to note that for some situations and regions social media data may not be available in such volumes, precluding their use to gain near real time insights

4 case studies are included:

  • Data-Pop Alliance: Big Data for Disaster Resilience
  • Assessment Capacities Project – Nepal Earthquake
  • Mapping Refugee Media Journeys
  • Nigerian Election

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