Digital Development Compass
The Digital Development Compass (DDC) is an exhaustive collection of a country’s digital indicators, sourced from publicly available datasets that we have aggregated and made usable for the first time. The DDC was first created as a tool for UNDP’s work in supporting inclusive, whole-of-society digital transformation with partners.
Overview
The DDC features hundreds of existing public data sets that provide indicators that provide insights on a country’s progress in digital transformation. Users can interact with the data to understand the digital state of any nation (based on publicly available data) and see comparisons and recommendations. It is the biggest compilation of global datasets on digital, aggregating and visualizing these metrics for the first time.
Key Benefits
The DDC’s 189 data sets creates the first raw dataset of development data:
- A tool for COs: provides a quick way to get detailed information on digital in the country; support can easily escalate by following up with the Digital Readiness Assessment
- Thought leadership: demonstrates UNDP’s skills in digital by providing this tool globally.
- A hub for development actors: enables UNDP to be at the center of the global discussion on digital development by establishing an advisory group to contribute to, curate, and maintain our universal database
- Cross-team support: prevent 'reinventing the wheel' by providing an extensible tool as a Digital Public Good. Already the data sets are being used to support the ExO Digital Readiness Assessment, human rights group as well as the gender team.
Function
Each country can explore each pillar and sub-pillar to see its review strengths and weakness – according to existing public data. Each sub-pillar maps to a specific ‘maturity stage’. Each subpillar consists of any number of indicators. Indicators can be viewed by raw score or by DRA score. Percentage of data available is also displayed. Comparisons are possible between regions, sub-regions, and income group.
Example: Understanding Digital Moldova
DDC enables users to see all the public data on digital related to Moldova, investigate where the strengths and weaknesses are, and see what impact improvements would have. For instance, identifying that under the Government Pillar, Digital Public Services ranks well while Funding and Procurement has a concerningly low score, indicating a need for improvement. Meanwhile the Government Pillar is missing data around Leadership and Coordination, Monitoring and Capabilities, indicating a need for further research, such as through UNDP’s Digital Readiness Assessment or UNCDF’s SDG Digital Finance Ecosystem assessment (SDFE). Specific digital indicators are also available in an easy-to-understand format, making it quickly visible that on the World Bank's Doing Business Index the rank is 73.54% or that 98% of the population is covered by mobile 3G data according to the GSMA.
Learn More
Automations scrape spreadsheets, PDFs, and documents into a machine-readable format. Scripts normalize the data according to a UN-defined list of countries, regions, sub-regions, income groups, & territorial borders. Data is automatically updated international organizations release new reports. All code and data is transparent and available as a global resource on GitHub, on the path to becoming a Digital Public Good. Visit https://github.com/undp/digital-development-compass to see the latest.