The Center for Continuing Education (CCE) at Birzeit University in Palestine - the current host for the MENA OD4D hub, has joined the Global Data Barometer project and the Global Community of Regional Hubs in fall 2020. GDB will provide a new benchmark on country-level data governance, data capability, data availability, and data use for the public good
To set up regional hubs, the Global Data Barometer team began with the Open Data for Development Network, through which they established hub partnerships for Latin America, MENA, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and a prospective hub for North America. These partnerships gave a strong foundation to build upon, and as GDB project aims to cover more than 120 countries, the project still had a few gaps, so an open call to cover the Eastern Partnership, European Union, Central Asia, Hong Kong, Russia, Small Pacific Island States, and Western Balkans was put out in September 2020. The GDB partnership consists of both regional and thematic partners.
Today, we at CCE are excited to be part of this global community of GDB Regional hubs. Our hub is responsible for thematic data research on Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman.
The GDB project started developing the Global Data Barometer in 2019 in response to demand expressed at the 2019 Open Government Partnership Summit for updated, in-depth, country-level insights on data governance and availability. Throughout 2020 consultations on the study design and building a broad community of regional research hubs and thematic partners took place. We've been part of these processes as a main hub and as contributors to the Open Data Barometer before.
Our hub will continue supporting the Global Data Barometer project through engaging in the study design process, data collection, data analysis and dissemination of the results. The expert survey will generate data on more than 100 countries, leading to a new research-ready open dataset, in-depth analysis, and country and sectoral profiles covering several countries in the region.
As data collection is expected to start in early March, 2021 for up to three months, we are planning to recruit a number of country researchers to help with data collection and verification. A survey will also be shared with key data officials in the targeted countries.
The GDB project and partnership are directly related to CCE’s current focus on data for development and programs being implemented to utilize data for public good through economic and social development
