Making lightweight, live comparison testing more readily available to the sector as a whole
On the new data sets front, I've been looking at last-mile health record digitization and interoperability. There are some promising cases of traction via smartphone-compatibility like UCS in Tanzania, or MedTrack in Ghana (who I've been directly working with). Speaking for MedTrack, I can say that we're already working with the goal of creating a usable administrative data set.
On the front of currently inaccessible but existing data, I think there's more potential for looking to business than government. Mobile money platforms have already done some limited cooperation with research, to my knowledge. They'd likely be reluctant to form a large number of data sharing partnerships, but a single partner that translates the data into an anonymized aggregate set and then acts as the go-between could create a lot of potential for assessing economic impact. From an incentive perspective, they could make some kind of commission from access, and it makes for good CSR optics.
On the last point, I'd propose that there's an underserved need for simplified impact eval that rules out obviously ineffective interventions or deployments early and affordably. We spend so much time focusing on the maximum of rigor in analysis that we can lose sight of the operational value of quick and dirty numbers, especially if that practice can be low friction enough to become normalized in the sector. What I'd really want to see is an interface to set up live dashboards that just run a straightforward a/b test or something.
What I'm suggesting is really about:
On the new data sets front, I've been looking at last-mile health record digitization and interoperability. There are some promising cases of traction via smartphone-compatibility like UCS in Tanzania, or MedTrack in Ghana (who I've been directly working with). Speaking for MedTrack, I can say that we're already working with the goal of creating a usable administrative data set.
On the front of currently inaccessible but existing data, I think there's more potential for looking to business than government. Mobile money platforms have already done some limited cooperation with research, to my knowledge. They'd likely be reluctant to form a large number of data sharing partnerships, but a single partner that translates the data into an anonymized aggregate set and then acts as the go-between could create a lot of potential for assessing economic impact. From an incentive perspective, they could make some kind of commission from access, and it makes for good CSR optics.
On the last point, I'd propose that there's an underserved need for simplified impact eval that rules out obviously ineffective interventions or deployments early and affordably. We spend so much time focusing on the maximum of rigor in analysis that we can lose sight of the operational value of quick and dirty numbers, especially if that practice can be low friction enough to become normalized in the sector. What I'd really want to see is an interface to set up live dashboards that just run a straightforward a/b test or something.