News Archive

It is with great pleasure that we share about our Global Data Lab Master Thesis winner 2024, Zeinab Hassano. Congratulations for this achievement. We very much enjoyed reading your work, Zeinab.

Zeinab won the prize for her MA thesis entitled “Unveiling gendered labour dynamics amidst droughts: The case for African countries”. She employs an event study difference-in-difference design to show that women in rural areas experience a significant increase in agricultural employment due to droughts. In turn, male employment in the agriculture sector declines. Her results are indicative of women in rural areas relying more on agriculture as a fallback during droughts. We consider her research question and analysis not only interesting but also very relevant from a policy point of view.

The prize traveled all the way from Nijmegen School of Management / Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Many thanks to our colleagues Pedro Naso and Rob Hart for handing over the prize on our behalf. Pedro is a development and environmental economist and has supervised Zeinab’s thesis. Pedro and I share our alma mater. We both hold a PhD in Economics from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Check out Pedro's website here: https://pedronaso.com/. Rob is professor of economics and focuses on “the development of the global – spaceship – economy in the very long run, and the management of that development through policy instruments.” He was the course coordinator of Zeinab’s MA thesis course and the external examiner of her thesis. Rob made it possible that Zeinab could get the Global Data Lab 2024 MA prize. Thanks very much, Rob, for your efforts and support.

It is small friendly exchanges and welcoming gestures such as the travelling of our prize from Nijmegen to Uppsala and the contact with our colleagues from Sweden that add up and can make the big, positive difference.

We appreciate that the MA students of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) are aware of our Global Data Lab and make use of our resources. We would like to use this opportunity to invite other universities, researchers, and students, as well as policy makers, and development practitioners around the globe to check out our resources and work with our open source data. Kindly let us know about your data needs. We aim to continuously update and improve our resources in line with our mission to turn data into knowledge and contribute to evidence-based decision making around the world.

For the MA thesis prize 2025 we look forward to many interesting submissions making use of our data. For further information, please reach out to contact@globaldatalab.org.

We have released an update of our homepage! The set up of our Global Data Lab website has been completely revamped. Now, you can directly identify our indicators organized by theme. We hope that this reorganization makes our data more easily findable and accessible for your research and policy questions.

At the moment we present national and sub-national indicators for the following themes:

• SHDI
• Education and work
• Health
• Climate
• Wealth
• Gender
• Demographics
• Governance

We are excited to share that we had the third edition of the GDL Best MA Thesis Prize in 2024. We are proud to announce Rayza Zander as the 2024 BA Prize Winner with his thesis entitled "The effect of temperature on educational attendance in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1989–2022". Congratulations!

Not only has the Global Data Lab given out the MA Thesis Prize for the second time but also the BA Thesis Prize. We are proud to announce Ylonka Bakker as the 2023 BA Prize Winner with her thesis entitled "The effect of population pressure on the International Wealth Index within different sub-regions in Nigeria". Congratulations.

We are excited to share that we had the second edition of the GDL Best MA Thesis Prize in 2023. Róbin Smaal won the prize for her thesis entitled "Impact of Climate Initiatives on Emissions and Human Development in Africa". Congrats to Robin from the entire Global Data Lab team.

Next week Jeroen Smits will present the small-area data of the Global Data Lab at the convening “MERGE: Creating a new interdisciplinary global data platform for human impacts of climate extremes” that is organized from 16-20 October at the Bellagio Convening Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Italy, https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/bellagio-center/.

The Global Data Lab is happy to announce the immediate availability of an API for its datasets. We introduce an R package to interface with it directly from your scripts. Access to the API is free, though an account is required to create a personal API token. These tokens are used to rate-limit the use of the API, allowing us to hopefully prevent abuse.

Currently, an account is limited to creating one active API token. If you would like to use the GDL Data API in a classroom setting, please contact us for a tailor-made solution.

The Global Data Lab is happy to announce the first release of its GDL Vulnerability Index (GVI). This is an index to monitor and project socio-economic vulnerability to climate change. It can be used to compare the socio-economic component of climate change vulnerability of countries worldwide and to project how countries will fare along the five Shared Socio-economic Pathways.

Global Data Lab has released a new version of its Subnational Human Development Index, adding data for 2020 and 2021. We invite you to make use of it and to report back to us in case you encounter problems.

A new version of the Area Database is available, consisting of 134 countries, 1451 sub-national regions and 129 indicators. New surveys included are: Côte d'Ivoire (2016), Fiji (2021), Nepal (2019), Vietnam (2021). Also note that for MICS rounds 6 and 7, the indicators for refrigerator and TV improved.