IATI strengthens its resolve to address poverty

By Iddi
Yire, GNA

Accra, Oct. 7, GNA – The International Aid
Transparency Institution (IATI) is to strengthen its resolve to address poverty
by making information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand.

Mr Theo van de Sande, IATI Governing Chair,
said the institution was doing its best to make their efforts worthwhile in
order to help achieve the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) agenda.

Mr van de Sande said this at the product
presentation of finalists of the Hackathon competition in Accra.

Hackathon is a design sprint-like event in
which computer programmers and others involved in software development,
including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others,
often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate intensively on software
projects.

The event was organised by the Africa Open
Data and Internet Research Foundation, in partnership with the IATI and the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The event follows a hacking competition that
was launched last month, where young Ghanaian ethical hackers were tasked to
make use of, and analyse open data that could affect decision making in the
country, positively.

Competitors were in groups of four and made
use of open data available online, on various sectors in the country including
the agriculture and energy sectors by making projections and developing problem
solving applications based on their analysis.

The finalists were judged based on
innovativeness, uniqueness, how user friendly their inventions were, as well as
how they considered data protection issues.

Mr van de Sande said the only way to reach
anywhere near the SDGs or improve situations was to enrich and strengthen
standards all the time.

“We have done a good job over the last 10
years and we can do better,” he said.

He said the AITI would cooperate with other
suppliers of data to see whether it could strengthen its platform.

Madam Radhika Lal, UNDP Economic Advisor to
Ghana and The Gambia, who chaired the function, charged the competitors to make
the data they gather and analyse, speak.

‘It is important to combine different data
sets to make them speak, thereby giving a clear visualization of the
issues,” she said.

She added that there needed to be much more
dialogue with the municipal and district assemblies, as regards feedback on
issues bothering on open data.

The teams were tasked by a panel of three
judges to take to gather data from different sources and put them to use to get
the most efficient and supporting solutions possible. 

Which means that if adequate data was
gathered, computing resources and algorithms can be used to transform them to
be meaningful to decision makers.

The first team analysed open data on the
Electricity Company of Ghana’s electricity usage by regions, deducing that the
Western Region had the lowest number of customers, but the highest number as
regards consumption.

The second group look at the agricultural
sector, focusing on how waste from harvested plants could be recycled and used
for animal feed and manure.

The Third group also analysed open data on the
agricultural sector but focused on how farmers and farms can be beneficial to
each other, hence being interdependent.

The three teams were each awarded a prize of
GH¢1,000.00.

GNA

قالب وردپرس