3 minute read
Imagine you work in local government and want to improve the lives of homeless people in your area. You might be able to find a few case studies of projects that address homelessness, but do you know how other local governments have defined goals for programmes to tackle this problem? Can you find examples of projects that seek to address similar issues? In a similar context?
Across the world, people are working to solve a wide range of complex problems such as homelessness, long term unemployment or reducing crime rates through projects that use cross sector collaboration. Addressing these challenges often involves the joint work of governments, private sector, and third sector organisations. Even though these collaborations share similar rhetoric and promise, it is often too difficult and expensive to access information about other projects.
This is why we started the INDIGO initiative. With the support of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), we've been able to help more people share and use quality data. Our INDIGO Peer Learning Group quarterly sessions and Hack and Learn events have also allowed us to build a strong community and space for learning and exchange in the field.
Its main objective is to support the use of quality data by policymakers who are addressing complex social and environmental problems. Data standards initiatives already exist in particular sectors, but INDIGO’s key contribution is to harmonise those standards – and culture – across sectors involved in impact bonds and other outcome-based projects. We are collaborating with existing standards. We are borrowing wheels, not reinventing them.
Crucially, data are shared by and for the INDIGO community. Data quality (i.e. accuracy, completeness, consistency, credibility, and currentness) is only as good as the data shared.
Data may be inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, and/or not current for various reasons: INDIGO is a collaborative and interactive initiative that mostly relies on projects all over the world volunteering to share their data. We have a system for processing information and try to attribute data to named sources, but we do not audit, cross-check, or verify all information provided to us. Not everyone agrees that all these data should be public and those that do agree are very busy. It takes time and resources to share data, which may not have been included in a project’s budget. Many of the projects are ongoing and timely updates may not be available. Different people may have different interpretations of data items and definitions. Even when data are high quality, interpretation or generalisation to different contexts may not be possible and/or requires additional information and/or expertise.
Nonetheless, INDIGO offers the world’s most complete open dataset on impact bonds and we are collaboratively working towards higher quality data together. Want to help us improve our data? Get in touch and share your data.
There are many ways to download our data. Check out this page for more details on how to download CSVs of project listings and organisation listings. You can also find out how to download by data type, as individual Excel files and as JSON from the API.
If you would like to send us an update, or add any missing projects, organisations or other data to our databases, please get in touch with us at indigo@bsg.ox.ac.uk. We will get back at you as soon as possible.
For more information on sharing data with INDIGO, click here.
Get in touch! Email us at indigo@bsg.ac.ox.uk to talk about sharing data on new projects, changes or performance updates on current projects, clarifications or corrections on our data, and/or confidentiality or sensitivity notices.
For more information on sharing data with INDIGO, click here.
Not in most cases. For most projects, we have collected data and we are asking you to update the sheet.
Additionally, we have identified three levels of priority for each tab in the spreadsheet.
The levels are noted in the INDIGO Data Dictionary and at the top of each tab in the INDIGO Data Template Spreadsheet.