Mezuri: Smart Data for Development
The Challenge: Timely and Actionable Development Data
The continual improvement of technology and the digitization of vast amounts of survey, sensor, network, and other numerical and text data
are promising more reliable, real-time information for development actors. The ability to use this data, however, is hampered by the inability to
process this enormous quantity of disparate data in a timely manner. To overcome this challenge, the development community needs a complete
end- o end data pipeline to not just capture and aggregate raw data, but also process it into meaningful results and provide actionable outputs
t through compelling visualizations and robust statistics. The Mezuri team is working to build a comprehensive tool that meets all of these needs.
The Innovation: Mezuri Data Platform
The Mezuri Data Platform is a modular platform for data collection, aggregation, visualization, and decision support, with the ability to take data
from a variety of sources, including sensors, surveys, and digital streams. The platform’s unique data provenance tracking algorithm ensures
that original data sets remain accessible even after analyses have been performed, enabling a truly collaborative and open community of
researchers and development actors to share data sets, learn from others’ interventions, and build upon prior successes to increase the efficacy
of future development interventions. Robust visualization and decision support help researchers to be nimble in their projects, making smarter
decisions closer to real time (within hours and days of data collection, rather than months or years).
Impact
The Mezuri Data Platform stands to revolutionize the way international development impact data is collected and utilized. Social scientists
will be able to track impact faster and better, allowing for smarter experiment design, and avoiding repetition of prior work. Engineers and
scientists w ill no longer need to build redundant data management systems and can instead devote their expertise to developing and iterating
transformative technologies. Funding agencies and international aid organizations will have access to a continual view of programs, allowing
them to understand what is and is not working. Finally, Mezuri will help the research and development practitioner community at large by making
it easier to share, vet, and build upon data, processing code, and statistical analysis of existing projects. As in any other field, it is not just more
data, but smart data that are the key to more effective programming. The Mezuri platform will deliver smart data to development.
Key Attributes
Flexible data
sources
Multi-step data
processing,
cleaning, and
statistical analysis
Provenance
and
repeatability
Security,
scalability, and
reliability
Openness and
flexibility
Sharing and
Collaboration
Mezuri at a Glance
Partners
x
PAGE 12
x
X
X