Data dumping for development: Turning stats into stories

The World Bank’s open data policy recently celebrated its first anniversary. The New York Times  marked the occasion with a detailed story by Stephanie Strom, outlining the changing attitudes to transparency at the institution, and proclaiming that the Bank’s data could one day become more valuable than its lending and infrastructure projects.The availability of World Bank data is no doubt highly valuable to donor and recipient governments, academics, NGOs, economists and other development practitioners. But there is one group who seems to have shown little enthusiasm in using the data so far, perhaps the group most crucial in filtering information on the Bank’s practices down to the grassroots — journalists.Blog post by Ashlee Betteridge for the Development Policy Centre, 19 September 2011. Read full post