The brief: The Transforming Education Pakistan (TEP) programme is a multi-year DFID-funded campaign aiming to increase political will to deliver education reform in Pakistan. An integral element of the campaign is the development of a data observatory platform that will corral the definitive data sources on education data (infrastructure, financial, enrolment, performance etc.) and present them in an accessible format. These data will provide a solid foundation against which change in Pakistani education can be tracked, and detailed analysis of the drivers and constraints of reform identified.
On behalf of HTSPE, the lead contractor on this programme, Accadian appointed Whythawk and the Open Knowledge Foundation as service providers to build the data observatory platform and provide guidance and support in how data are procured and managed.
Our solution: Whythawk collaborated with stakeholders in Pakistan, Alif Ailaan and SDPI, to develop and offer appropriate training sessions on management and tools for an open data portal, licensing, curation, versioning and quality control for data, and other matters. These training sessions took take place in Islamabad to ensure that the personnel were well prepared for the launch of the open data portal.
Whythawk project managed the development of the open data portal by leveraging free, open source open data software (CKAN), prior to undertaking a training and final scoping visit to Pakistan. A custom dashboard system was developed for the platform in order to present data in an engaging visual format.
The result: The portal has collated data from numerous different research organisations, public and private. The visual dashboards are being used to support education advocacy efforts by Alif Ailaan, a Pakistani organisation dedicated to improving education outcomes in Pakistan.