Bringing The World Bank's Data To Sub-National Levels

We like to work on things that matter, this sometimes translates into building data visualizations allowing you to better understand and explore Open Data. We often work with the World Bank and recently had the opportunity to work on a product that will soon let you visualize and access the World Bank’s sub-national Open Data. This means you will be able to dive into poverty or nutrition issues worldwide at a regional level.

We believe it to be a big deal for the international development community at large; most Open Data available out there is collected and represented at a national level, and rarely is more granular. We hope that the release of this tool will mean better informed policy-makers and public individuals, helping the World Bank in its fight against poverty and for nutrition.

We built a very flexible tool that will allow for expansion as more sub-national data becomes available. Keep in mind however that the data is collected differently in each country, thus comparison is limited to each country (for now).

The subnational app at work with data from Nepal

Our technical approach for this product was focused on simplicity; we prove once again that static application are a quick and secure way to build elegant solutions that scale to millions and are easy to maintain. Through the development the entire platform was hosted on GitHub pages.

We can’t wait to launch it and see how the international development community uses it. We hope to learn more from its users as we kick off the redesign of data.worldbank.org (for more on this, stay tuned).