Data4Pakistan, the first initiative of its kind in the country, provides open and public access to a spatial interactive portal that has poverty estimates for every district in Pakistan, along with over 120 development and policy indicators. The portal currently has six rounds of district poverty and development data, covering the period 2004-2018.
What is Data4Pakistan?
Part of Ehsaas strategy, the #Data4Pakistan portal has been developed in collaboration with the
World Bank and will be hosted on the Ehsaas website of Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety Division: pass.gov.pk. This portal will be a very valuable resource for federal, provincial and district level policymakers, for decision making.
Interactive maps allow the user to visualize and compare districts on poverty and two additional indicators. Mousing over a district provides information on the selected indicators as a pop-up message. The user can also select a subset of provinces or a subset of districts to focus on, using a simple drop-down list. Custom maps built by the user can be downloaded and printed.
The innovative portal uses data produced by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, as part of its Social and Living Standards Measurement Surveys as well as the Multiple indicators Custer Surveys produced by the provincial Bureaus of Statistics. The indicators currently available in the portal, include a range of demographic, health, education and employment statistics as well as access to key services like water, sanitation, electricity and gas. It also provides a number of gender parity indices at the district level.
An ‘Additional Resources’ section on the website provides information on the indicators included in the portal and other background material and reports. New material as well as new data and indicators will be added frequently.
Ehsaas is about the creation of a ‘welfare state’ by countering elite capture and leveraging 21st century tools—such as using data and technology to create precision safety nets and promoting social welfare and poverty alleviation solutions. The opening of #Data4Pakistan portal is another important step of the government to foster evidence-based decision making.
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