Since January 2018, the Centre for Humanitarian Data has partnered with the Education Above All Foundation to improve access to data on education in emergencies. The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform now hosts over 2,000 education datasets, a 500% increase over the past two years. 

The Education in Emergencies thematic page on HDX.

There are 78 organizations sharing education data on HDX. This includes, among others, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP, ACLED, REACH, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, and Education Clusters in fourteen countries. The average number of education-related dataset downloads per month has grown from 2,040 per month at the start of 2018 to 17,323 per month in 2019, reflecting a strong demand for education data by humanitarian and development actors as well as researchers and journalists.

Monthly downloads of education datasets on HDX from January 2018 to November 2019.

We have worked closely with the Global Education Cluster and the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies to post high-value datasets from national and sub-national education clusters in many countries, including Nigeria, Yemen, and Bangladesh (Cox’s Bazar). Much of our education statistics data comes from existing relationships with partners like UNESCO and UNICEF, who have together posted more than 300 datasets on HDX.

Through a partnership with the Middle East Education Research Training and Support programme (a joint initiative of the US Agency for International Development, FHI 360, and Social Impact), detailed education data and visualizations from the Iraq and Syria Education Clusters are now available on HDX.

More recently, we partnered with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) to analyze almost 9 million tweets to identify discussions about education insecurity in the Middle East and Africa. We trained QCRI’s Artificial Intelligence for Digital Response (AIDR) platform to categorize Twitter posts that refer to attacks on schools, school facilities, or teachers and students. The goal is to look for correlations between actual education insecurity events and discussion about attacks on education on social media.

We are grateful that so many new education data providers have shared their datasets on HDX. We will be working to expand this coverage while maintaining and updating existing datasets. If you would like to learn more or are interested in sharing your organization’s data, contact us at hdx@un.org

EAA Education Education data Partnerships