I am part of the Data for Children Collaborative which is a joint partnership between UNICEF, The Scottish Government and the University of Edinburgh’s Data Driven Innovation Programme. It seeks to improve outcomes for children locally, nationally and globally. We draw on the strengths of all partners to bring insight and solve problems using data and data science techniques. Currently i am involved in two projects listed below.  I am always happy to discuss dissertation opportunities that arise through the Collaborative. 

Child Poverty and Access to Services

I am the Principle Investigator on this project which has a focus on mapping children’s physical accessibility to key services, such as  health clinics and primary schools in selected countries. We aim to establish whether the travel time to a key service could help explain a child’s lack of access to that service, and how access is related to multidimensional childhood poverty. The team includes: Charlotte Haddon (RA in Geospatial Livelihoods Group and Geosciences), William Smith in the School of Education, Sohan Seth in the School of Informatics, Magnus Hagdorn in the School fo Geosciences, Enrique Delamonica from UNICEF. and Jodie Brumhead formerly of the Geospatial Livelihoods Group and now with Scottish Government For more information see the Data for Children website and we will add a new page summarising the work as we complete particular milestones.  The workis currently focused on Uganda.

Building Footprint Identification for Population Estimations

I am a co-investigator on this project which has a focus on population estimates at the local level to better support health services planning and delivery. We want to explore if we can create a model that is better able to distinguish and systematise building types using satellite images, in turn providing better populations estimates at a local level. This will help to support health services and delivery, with a goal to initially inform immunisation programming, but with scope to be transferable to other programmes in the future.  The team includes: Sohan Seth and Isaac Neal in Informatics, myself and Mamadou Saliou Diallo from UNICEF. The work is currently focused on Mozambique.

Childrens Climate Risk Index with UNICEF

I am a co-investigator on this project which is working with UNICEF on the childrens climate risk index that they have developed. The project involves adding climate projections (UoE), investigating how to project the socioeconomic vulnerability to 2050 (University of Southampton) and developing further plans for improving the index in the future (University of Stirling). I am leading a work-package investigating how to downscale the global index to sub-national levels using existing household survey data for Uganda and Tanzania. The work has also been covered in several media outlets: Guardian; Telegraph; BBC Newsround;  Independent;  bdnews24 (Bangladesh); The Times;