How Has the World Bank Supported Data Production, Sharing, and Use?
This evaluation finds that the World Bank has been highly effective in producing influential data globally and until recently in promoting global data partnerships.
- The World Bank was mostly effective at the country level in supporting data production, promoting open data, encouraging some country clients to share data, and in building the capacity of national statistical organizations in countries where it adopted a system-wide approach.
- The World Bank was less effective in adapting to the changed global partnership landscape where the complementarity of new partnerships is less clear. It was also less effective in fully using its leverage to encourage data sharing by client countries which have been reluctant to do so, and even less effective in promoting data use in government decision making, building subnational data capacity, strengthening country clients’ administrative data systems, and staying at the forefront in analyzing the potential and pitfalls of big data for development.
See Chapter 2, Global Development Data, and Chapter 3, Building the Data Capacity of Countries, for more information
Four Questions that Guided the Evaluation
Recommendations
1. Implement goals and priorities reflecting the findings of this evaluation with regard to the World Bank’s support to global data and global partnerships, country data capacity, and a user-centered data culture.
2. Mobilize and deliver additional support to countries’ statistical systems, using a more comprehensive model of statistical capacity building that also factors in needs and opportunities to strengthen administrative data systems.
3. Step up engagements with global partners and client governments on long-term funding for development data.
4. Scale up promotion of data sharing and data use.
5. Implement coordinated actions so that World Bank operations benefit from big data’s insights and clients receive appropriate support for big data use.
Watch In Brief: Why Data Matters in Development
To guide its inquiry, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) developed a list of ingredients for successful national data systems of the future, included in the infographic below.