IDRC at the UN’s World Data Forum 2020

The 2020 Virtual UN World Data Forum presented the latest data solutions and thinking to support the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and now more urgently, for monitoring and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The forum consisted of pre-recorded panels and live sessions from October 19 to 21, 2020.
IDRC hosted a pre-recorded discussion about overcoming research silos and ensuring that coordinated perspectives and research from the Global South informs holistic approaches to data governance, innovation, and use.
Data for Development: Towards a More Integrated Agenda from the Global South
The speakers were:
- Jade Abbott, senior machine learning engineer, Retro Rabbit
- Pyrou Chung, director of the Open Development Initiative, East-West Management Institute
- Fabrizio Scrollini, executive director, Open Data Latin America Initiative (who leads IDRC-supported research on data for development)
- Romesh Silva, senior technical specialist, United Nations Population Fund (who leads an IDRC-supported project to build a culture of vital statistics production)
The session was moderated by IDRC Vice-President of Programs, Dominique Charron.
That session can be viewed here:
The Centre of Excellence for Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) Systems, housed at IDRC, partnered with Vital Strategies and the World Health Organization to develop a session on counting vital events and monitoring patterns of mortality to halt the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Visualizing the Invisible: Registering deaths and tracking mortality in the era of COVID-19
The speakers were:
- Montasser Kamal, team leader, Maternal and Child Health, IDRC
- Fátima Mrué, Secretary of Health, city of Goiânia, Brazil
- Janet W. Mucheru, Registrar-general of Civil Registration Services and deputy director-general of Information System Management, National Statistics and Information Authority, Kenya
- Samira Sama, assistant director general, Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact, World Health Organization
The session was moderated by Anir Chowdhury, policy advisor for the Government of Bangladesh, and Philip Setel, vice-president for CRVS at Global Strategies.
That session can be viewed here.