Together with Telefónica, we presented our SDGs and data initiatives in Costa Rica: Data Republica, data lab for sustainable development, and the online course Data journalism for sustainable development.
Cepei and Telefónica, as members of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) signed in 2016 an agreement to strengthen the data ecosystem for sustainable development in Latin America; this is how the data laboratory Data Republica came to birth.
The project was presented on April 26 in San José, Costa Rica, and is available on the website www.datarepublica.org. Through this platform users get to know which institutions contribute and use data related to the Sustainable Development Goals in Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica; identify existing tools to work with large amounts of data; share stories based on data and visualize them in innovative ways; as well as access to educational content to learn about data and the sustainable development agenda of the region.
“Telefónica promotes this initiative with the purpose of informing and encouraging the national press to analyze open data related to the SDGs. From our role as a telecommunications operator committed to the deployment of connectivity, we are dedicated to making it easier for us as a society to get closer to the world of data. The goal is clear: identify opportunities for innovation to make decisions that improve the way we all live”.
Johanna Escobar, Country Director, Telefonica Costa Rica
The platform collects and centralizes data from different institutions and associates them with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in order to identify the information available to measure ODS indicators. Likewise, under its Learning component, it offers initiatives for the development of capacities related to the use of data.
The space with journalists was also an opportunity to announce the launch of the online course: “Data Journalism for Sustainable Development”, an initiative of Cepei and Data Republica, supported by Telefónica, Connectas and SocialTIC, aimed mainly at journalists and communicators. The course, hosted on the MiriadaX platform of Telefónica Educación Digital, will begin on May 14, 2018 and is part of the Data Journalism 2030 component of the Data República project.
“Data journalism is more relevant today than ever because it allows us to analyze and reuse public data to create development stories which are an effective mechanism to follow-up and monitor the implementation of the global sustainable development agenda, defined by the United Nations as the world road map to transform our world by 2030″.
Fredy Rodríguez, Cepei