Data Corps — a 21st century international development program
Co-founder and Chief Scientist @mWaterCo, engineer, former rocket scientist. Writes about water, sanitation and technology.
Staff from the Lake Victoria Basin Water Board in Tanzania learning to perform mobile infrastructure surveys.
During these strangely short days of quarantine, when I feel overwhelmed by news about our national failure to contain the coronavirus outbreak and updates from our friends in New York who are getting sick, I find myself thinking forward a year or two. What will the world look like then? How will our culture and society change in response to this disaster? Here’s one idea.
The United States needs a new kind of Peace Corps for the 21st century. When John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps in 1961 to “promote world peace and friendship,” the world was very different. International development was focused on rural villages that lacked access to markets and education. Today, we live in an urban world and even the most remote villages are connected via mobile networks, roads, and a globalized economy. Where the Peace Corps model was focused on participatory rural development and finding local solutions, development today depends on uptake of new technology and scaling up of widely applicable approaches.
Since the most valuable commodity in today’s connected world is data, let’s create a Data Corps of young people who go to every country of the world who will have them and help set up data systems for public health and infrastructure. The host countries will get free help with their data needs in exchange for sharing certain anonymized data streams of public health interest, such as disease surveillance data. Our tech-savvy digital natives who are graduating from college today have a valuable skill, and one that is in short supply in many countries that are just starting to get the entire population online.
In our work setting up national or regional data systems in dozens of countries, we have found that the number one limiting resource is not smartphones, mobile network access, or enthusiasm on the part of governments. It is the time and patient effort required to build up the knowledge and experience of the workforce to collect, analyze, and act on data. It takes one-on-one teaching, on-the-job trainings, and developing local ’super users’ who can manage databases and create their own reports and visualizations. That sounds like a job for the Data Corps. We are already doing this in several countries where we work side by side with local data managers to handover management of systems and enable them to build their own systems. It takes a lot of time, and the approach of traditional international aid organizations is too focused on managing projects and extractive data collection to meet the requirements of their donors. The Data Corps volunteers could provide the time and focused effort needed to make a lasting change in local data management capacity.
To make sure we never get caught off guard again, the United States should also create a national institute for disease surveillance and modeling. It can receive and interpret all this data coming in from countries and send specialists out to investigate emerging hot spots. The institute should have the power to enact temporary travel bans, mandatory testing programs, and quarantine orders. We can never again depend on presidents who don’t believe in science and governors who don’t understand exponential growth. We don’t let the president decide when airplanes should be grounded due to an approaching storm. We let the FAA decide. The same principle should apply to emerging infectious disease threats.
We have an amazing reservoir of talented epidemiologists and public health experts in the United States, but our government wasn’t listening to them back in January when there was still time to take decisive action. We also have brilliant data scientists and software engineers, but most of them are working on ways to monetize your personal data and attention for the benefit of tech companies in Silicon Valley. Following the Peace Corps model, the Data Corps can give tech-savvy young people a prestigious and altruistic job for a few years, then they can go take a job in the Valley or on Wall Street. Some will decide to become epidemiologists or experts in biostatistics and public health. We will all benefit from the windfall.