Use cases

As real-time information on crop prices is limited in Kenya, middlemen and traders often define prices. M-Farm is a text-message based application, analysing historic data from up to ten years ago to determine price fluctuations and current market prices. In doing so, M-farm’s model can estimate wholesale commodities prices, both currently and in the future.

PWYP is an organisation that provides information on the revenues and governance structures of extractive industries like oil, gas, minerals and non-renewable resources. One of their example projects is the Open Mining application, which provides communities with information related to mining activities currently operating.

QEdu is a website created for those that use, work in or make policy decision about education. Its aim is to make educational data accessible and easy to digest for everyone. The website later inspired various research studies, for example the "Excelência com Equidade" study conducted by the Lemann Foundation and Itaú BBA Bank that investigated public schools hosting students of low socioeconomic status. The results led to 215 successful case studies bringing forward students of low socioeconomic status that obtained results with distinction.

Quandl is a platform that provides access to a myriad of databases, analyses and visualisations of financial, economic and alternative data. The platforms of roughly 400,000 people is geared towards finance professionals such as hedge fund analysts, asset managers, investment bankers, and even students. The platform is built around a number of sections: commodities, economics, forecasts, futures, options and stocks. These sections in turn provide information on consumer behaviour, business intelligence or industry metrics, and market predictions.

Rural E-Market is a web-application that provides local farmers living in remote areas with crop price information and product availability in various geographical areas. By incorporating both historical data and current prices, estimates for price ranges and markets trends are made available to farmers. In addition, the website offers information on crop production, agronomic advice, nutritional data and market information.

Thinknum is a platform that combines and indexes data from government sources, companies’ websites and social media activity. Primarily, the platform targets investors who lack access to relevant data and insights at one central location. As an example, the platform allows users to view certain store locations and overlay it with stores of a competitor, and subsequently connecting these data to median household income for instance. This combination can then be used to gauge store profitability.

TuvaLabs is a platform for people looking to improve their data analytical skills and their data literacy. TuvaLabs collaborates closely with teachers, schools, curriculum publishers and assessment organisations to enable teaching, learning and assessment of data literacy for students in primary and secondary education. Through the platform students can learn by doing and are given the opportunity to exchange knowledge with peers.