Our work centers on the idea of harnessing new streams of data to change how we think about policy and research in developing countries. Across these countries, there is a severe shortage of data that policymakers and researchers can use to design and implement effective policies. Some elite researchers and governments have access to better information in certain areas, but data scarcity incentivizes them to lock their assets in silos instead of deploying them for the public good.

We’re building a scalable open data platform that makes it easy for government, social scientists and anyone else generating high quality data to share data with each other, and creates a framework where they will actually want to do so. We’re bringing the open source movement to social science research, while also generating and disseminating essential, novel insights for policy-makers that are very difficult to create.

We need capable, motivated individuals to help us build an open data universe for poverty research, and to deploy these data to build better policy and contribute to making a better society.