If you have access to this article it already means that you are not one of the 795 million (or one in nine) people in this world that is suffering from chronic undernourishment (2016 World Hunger and Poverty Facts and Statistics, 2017).You must account yourself as lucky that you are not one of the 1.6 billion people who doesn’t have a adequate housing (Global Homelessness Statistics, 2017). And with the recent chaos in the world partly due to ISIS, you must be feeling more than lucky to be not one amongst the 59.5 million people who are being forced from their home (Global Issues Overview, 2017). All these global issues have been here even before we existed, but still remained unsolved. What if there already is a solution, but simply no one was willing to take any action yet? What if I told you that the ones who are holding onto the assets, what can result into a solution are actually already among us? The one who is holding this magic key to solve the global issues that have been troubling us for centuries are: the companies.
It may sound that a blame has just been putted on the companies, but that’s not the case here. On the contrary, it’s just the case that these companies don’t know that they can play such a major role in humanitarian aid yet. And the good thing is, they already have these assets! These assets are namely: data. You may be asking yourself now: what has data to do with solving global issues? The answer is simple, with data you have information, with information you have knowledge and with knowledge you will get solutions. But companies have to be willing to donate their technology, so new data can be collected. Next, they have to donate the data they already have to provide information. To transform this information into knowledge, they also have to donate their decision scientists. These decision scientists take the data, clean it up, afterwards transform it and will eventually put it into a useful algorithm (Soldner, 2017). And these algorithms will be the solution to global issues.
There already have been some cases where data has helped in tackling big problems in our world. In Senegal and Ivory Coast for example, Orange Telecom is using donated cell phone data to see where people are traveling with the patterns in the pings to the cell phone towers (Orange Telecom, 2014). This enabled them to make predictions where malaria might be spreading. Or take Planet Labs, an American private earth imaging company, they donated their data. This data contained satellite imagery. And with these images droughts can be predicted so aid funding can be provided before a drought crisis (Brewster, 2014).
But what’s in there for the companies? First of all, interest in companies who are fulfilling their part in corporate social responsibility is rising. So companies who are willing to become a part of the solution will receive good PR. Secondly, 53% out of the workforce want to be part of a company that makes a big impact and 72% percent of the students agreed with this (Zukin & Szeltner, 2012). So companies who will be a part of the solution will attract top employees easier (Meister, 2012). Evidently, these employees will also be more loyal and engage more in their job function while working such a company (Cheeseman, 2016). Employees who are committed to their job will put in 57% more effort and 87% are less likely to resign (Gammon, 2014). Also, people who will be aided in the developing countries are potential customers. And maybe the most convincing reason for companies to donate their data is that while the decision scientist are working on the data for the humanitarian aid, they will find new insights in the data that will also be essential and profitable for the companies when used.
To put it briefly, if companies donate their data, data scientists and technology there will finally be a solution to the global issues. Of course, the data collected should be carefully treated, to ensure privacy, but at least there will be some light at the end of the tunnel. This will not only benefit humanitarian organisations, NGO’s and governments, but also the companies and its employees and maybe eventually the world.
Hey Anny,
Nice post! I like how you took a more NGO / human development angle to the discussion of data analytics. So far I have come across data analytics in relation to e-commerce companies trying simply to sell more by using data. Best part of the post is to me the examples of how data could be used for causes you mention earlier.
What is a bit unclear for me is to whom companies should donate their data. So the data should be donated to solve world issues, but if a company decides to support this, what should the company exactly do? Where should they go?
Recently I learned a bit about a company which does (for-profit) work with data analytics on a huge scale. With respect to a wide range of problem solving based on big data you might want to check out this company: https://www.palantir.com
All the best,
Thijmen
Before reading your post, I have to admit I had no idea about what data philanthropy is. And actually when I googled it, I realized that more and more companies have adopted this big data initiative. In 2013 Mastercard, the well-known technology company in payments, launched the Mastercard Center for inclusive growth, trying among others to bring underserved constituencies into the global economy. Specifically, three of the main initiatives of this center are: sharing data insights – without exposing consumers’ sensitive data – data knowledge and leveraging expertise. One of the outputs of Mastercard’ s project was the demonstration of the relationship between robberies and businesses’ closing.
Generally, social problems are by their nature dynamic and very complex and many non-profit organizations invest in big data technologies to tackle them. The thing is that the data sharing among them is not enough. Customer insights, financial and product information are some example information held by private companies, not accessible to the above mentioned organizations. I understand that big companies want to keep their data confidential and not risk privacy issues. But I also believe that even under special regulations, more companies have to agree and contribute to the establishment of a “data bank”, reinforcing in this way social innovation and make non-profit organizations’ investments on big data technologies more beneficial.
References:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2017/08/07/mastercards-big-data-for-good-initiative-data-philanthropy-on-the-front-lines/#620a3e5e20dc
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/big_data_for_social_innovation