| Towards a Data-Driven Agriculture Sector in Jamaica | Towards a Data-Driven Agriculture Sector in Jamaica | Over the last two years, the Rural Agricultural Development Authority, the SlashRoots Foundation and the Mona School Of Business & Management have collaborated to explore how open data principles could be applied to the most pressing challenges in Jamaican Agriculture sector. Central to this work has been need to overcome structural constraints in resource availability and scale necessary to catalyzing a more data-driven agricultural sector in Jamaica.
This strategic initiatives seeks to apply emergent best practice on government digital services and an evolving theory of change for how data collaborations facilitated by shared open infrastructure can enable access to and the creation of high quality agricultural data assets and information services. The outcomes of the initiative would aid in the closing of existing data gaps, improve the information available to actors throughout the agricultural sector and exploring the implications an increasing digital and connected public service on data privacy and ownership. | View |
| Visualizing the structure and inkages in the Jamaican economy using National Statistics (Administrative Data) | Visualizing the structure and inkages in the Jamaican economy using National Statistics (Administrative Data) | The sectors of the economy are all linked together as portions of the output in one sector is consumed in another. The Input-Output (IO) Table analyses the Jamaican economy by showing the value of goods and service that are produced within each sector and how much of that which is produced is consumed locally in production and by consumers and that which is exported. The table also distributes the total import bill to the various sectors of the economy. Other “Supply and Use tables” collected from surveys and administrative sources, such as Labour Force, Education, Census, Housing and Trade collectively reflect the structural dynamics of the Jamaican economy. However much of this statistical information only presented as tabular data in a highly aggregated format, and in some cases and is only produced periodically (eg. the last I/O Table was produced in 2007).
Making this source data openly accessible and combined with visualization techniques can make this information much more impactful, accessible and with greater utility for business decision-makers and policy makers. This initiative will use these various sources of statistical data to create a visual map representation of the structural dynamics of the Jamaican economy that enhances the visibility and utility of this data and also creates additional re-use opportunities for other innovators through open APIs.
The Initiative will also explore the potential of big data" sources such as anonymized electricity consumption and mobile traffic / location data as a basis for proxy indicators to augment official statistics. | View |
