The partnership between the West Indies University and Cepei seeks to promote the participation of multiple stakeholders to measure and monitor the Sustainable Development Goals in the Caribbean through non-traditional data sources.
The measurement and monitoring of the SDGs have demonstrated the need to use large volumes of data, with a high level of detail, to complement official statistics and incorporate new measurement methods for problematics that have not yet been addressed. In response to this, big data has become an innovative solution tool to go beyond numbers and understand the social dynamics that impact the development of a territory.
Within the framework of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) Caribe project, the Mona School of Business and Management from the University of the West Indies and Cepei organized in Kingston, Jamaica, two workshops on big data and data visualization for local representatives of the private sector, academy, statistical offices and experts in data and statistics.
The first one, which took place on October 15, 2019, “Data revolution to make better decisions for sustainable development”, a workshop for the private sector, which addressed the importance, challenges and opportunities of the use and applications of big data in the private sector, as well as the benefits of contributing with big data to sustainable development in Jamaica.
The second workshop, “Training: connecting big data with science and technology”, was held between October 16 and 17. The two-day event had 30 participants and sought, through theoretical and practical sessions, to strengthen the technical and methodological skills for the application of big data to measure, implement and monitor SDG processes. The workshop also had a training component in data visualization where tools such as Tableau, Geoda, Esri ArcGIS, Cartoo and Qlik were explored.
