Here at the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF, we provide the platform that brings together the right data, skills and expertise to help solve some of the most pressing challenges facing children across the globe. But what does it mean to call something a ‘data collaborative as a service?’

On 8 March 2022, the Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) team—a collaboration between The GovLab and UNICEF—hosted a special 75-minute webinar on the RD4C principles and tools meant to enable the responsible handling of data for and about children.

Robust population data is fundamental for many UN agencies to operate efficiently and effectively. But there are widespread, and very valid, concerns about its accuracy. Across the UN, different teams are exploring how to obtain, and maintain, more accurate data – using satellite data, social media and machine learning along the way.

Something we have been keen to explore is how we can understand the value of our community engagement. We believe solving complex problems takes a community. But this has led to the question: “what do we mean by effective engagement, and how do we measure it?”

Northern Alliance regional improvement collaborative colleagues are working with the Data for Children Collaborative on a project to explore how to make better use of data to assess the poverty-related attainment gap across eight local authorities.

Knowledge Exchange, simply put, is the process of sharing information, ideas, and perspectives amongst individuals and organisations to enable new and impactful outcomes. In reality, we all practice a form of knowledge exchange in our daily lives – we communicate with our colleagues, peers, and friends.

Demonstrating impact can be a challenge in the development and humanitarian sector, and a Theory of Change is a key bridging tool to show how change will be effective to achieve intended impact.

Participation is much more than having a voice. It is about being informed, engaged and having an influence in decisions and matters.

The climate crisis is a child’s rights crisis. What can you do to help put children at the heart of climate action? In line with today’s focus on youth and public empowerment, we are releasing our policy brief based on our contributions to the Children’s Climate Risk Index.

This Global Ethics Day we’re delighted to launch the first piece in our DCC Dictionary series – all about ethics. We hope this empowers others to think about how they engage with ethics in both their personal and professional lives.

Given that good mental health is fundamental to children’s well-being, greater global investments are needed to support the services required to meet the complex and multifaceted mental-health challenges that children face today.

We’re delighted to release our Annual Report for 2021. It’s been a busy year for the Collaborative - we’ve expanded our team, met with lots of new people, built new partnerships and grown our project portfolio!

Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF’s Director Alex Hutchison won DataIQ 2021 Award in the Data for Good Champion category.

Have a read about what our small but mighty team get up to on a day-to-day basis and what they’re most excited about for the Collaborative this year.

The Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF supports the delivery of a new Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI) which will provide UNICEF with vital information about where children are most at-risk from the impacts of climate change, both now and in the future.

Over the last year we were delighted to be involved in helping to develop an Ethical Framework and Workbook for the Scottish Government’s Data and Intelligence Network. The aim? To create a practical and valuable tool that helped to embed ethical decision making across the Network’s data science projects.

It's been a busy few weeks for us as we've made the transition to Edinburgh Futures Institute. Read this blog from our Director Alex Hutchison, sharing her thoughts on our new home.

Our partners at the ONS FCDO Data Science Hub have been exploring if machine learning methods and publicly available spatial datasets can be used to map and understand HIV risk in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa for our HIV project.

Our Population Estimation project team have recently published a paper on their work so far.

When Covid-19 forced the closure of schools in Scotland to most pupils in March 2020, there was widespread concern about the impact this might have on the mental health and wellbeing of young people.