Case Studies
Find out more about the work of DSSGx UK, by taking a look at some in depth case studies on recent projects.
ITU
The project is in collaboration with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a specialised agency of the United Nations responsible for all matters related to information and communication technology.
ITU’s mission is to facilitate connecting all the world's people and to protect and support everyone's right to communicate. ITU and UNICEF have joined forces in the Giga initiative in a bid to connect every school to the Internet by 2030. Aside from directly benefitting children, schools often act as community hubs and so connecting a school often connects the surrounding community too.
This project aims to integrate a number of different data sources to provide real-time estimates of the number of offline people in local areas that would benefit from extending Internet connectivity. The new model will inform the prioritisation of infrastructure projects within Giga as well as policy and decision making at the community level more broadly, and enhance the understanding and use of national and local level internet connectivity data.
Save the Children and Unicef
This was a joint project between UNICEF and Save the Children to predict multi-dimensional child poverty in developing countries, to optimise both organisations resource allocation, national policy planning and ongoing advocacy across 50+ wide-ranging projects. These programs impact 197 million children each year alone in immunization, sanitation, nutrition and education outcomes. It took reference from Facebook’s Data4Good publications on the Global Wealth Index and used multiple data formats from satellite imagery to local survey data to create a resource prioritization application.
SMA
This project is a collaboration with the Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) in Chile. SMA is a public service responsible for conducting environmental inspections and ensuring compliance of thousands of facilities to protect the environment and public health.
Due to its limited budget, SMA cannot afford to respond to all citizen demands so it must prioritize where to allocate its efforts. Thousands of citizen complaints are received yearly on a wide range of environmental problems, and this figure has quadruplicated the past year with the launch of online complaints. Each citizen complaint needs to be analysed, and where relevant, lead to inspection and sanction processes.
The project will use a mix of structured (e.g., facility information) and unstructured (e.g., description of environmental problems) data to attempt to prioritise complaints by identifying those that are more likely to lead to grave sanctions as well as those that are outside of the SMA remit. This will help SMA attend to some of the environmental and public health issues that require pressing attention.
Transport for West Midlands
WMCA is a cluster of 18 local authorities and four Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), working collaboratively on many projects ranging from transport, jobs growth, industrial strategy, public service reform etc. to deliver their vision of a more prosperous West Midlands. As the region grows, both economically and in terms of population, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure high quality and equal access to transportation.
The goal of the project is to make transportation access in the West Midlands region fairer. The partner has indicated there is a problem of areas being isolated from public transport lines, with poor access to private vehicles and have a congested highway network – this is particularly prevalent among areas with high minority and low-income populations. Although the partner has some instinct on which areas are experiencing isolation, the volume, scope, and extent of the problem has not been analysed and quantified.
The project involves finding a better way to measure equity of access to transportation services, and creating a data product which allows policy makers to analyse if and where the disadvantaged people live, if the system as it currently is does not serve any particular demographic group, and offer insights on how to make transport better