News Archive

GDL Team wins NSM Team of the Year Award 2025
12 December 2025

The Global Data Lab has won the NSM Team of the Year Award for 2025! We are very grateful to be recognised in this way at yesterday's end-of-year reception from Nijmegen School of Management. Thanks in particular to Yvonne Benschop, vice dean of research, for her very kind and flattering words summarising recent accomplishments.

We're looking forward to further collaboration in the next year, expanding the Global Data Lab to become a greater platform for open science still.

GDL Thesis Awards 2025
4 December 2025

As Global Data Lab we are proud to announce the 2025 GDL prize winners. Our BA prize winner is Bas Hollander. Our MA prize winner is Luna van Son. Congratulations. Very well deserved.

Bas’ BA thesis "Institutions to the rescue? Examining their moderating role in climate-induced migration" addresses the moderating role of institutions in climate-induced migration. Bas employs data from 86 middle-income countries between 2002 and 2019 to examine whether a country’s institutional quality moderates the relationship between rising temperatures and emigration. Using fixed effects and long-difference regressions his results show limited evidence that stronger institutions mitigate emigration responses to rising temperatures in lower-middle-income countries. Concomitantly, he identifies that this moderating role seems non-linear as it weakens under extreme temperatures.

Luna won the MA thesis prize with her thesis entitled “The Costs of Climate Change: The Effect of Rising Temperatures on Children’s Nutritional Status in India”. She researches the effect of rising temperatures on children’s nutritional status in India. Employing WAZ and other health-related data from NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 in combination with weather data (e.g. daily temperatures) from ERA5, also Luna to create a district-level panel with 467 districts across two survey waves. Using a binned temperature approach Luna’s results show that the null hypothesis, which states that rising temperatures negatively affect children’s nutritional status in India, cannot be rejected. Her research question and analysis are not only interesting but also very relevant from a policy point of view.

Do you find the research of our GDL prize winners inspiring? You might want to consider writing your thesis with the data provided by Global Data Lab of Radboud University.

Global Data Lab pitch at Radboudumc Global Health event
26 November 2025

Thanks to everyone who listened to our Global Data Lab pitch about the public health, water, and nutrition related research we have conducted in Africa and beyond. We very much enjoyed the exchange with our Radboudumc colleagues during the Global Health event and look forward to many more interactions and joint initiatives.

GDL Thesis Awards 2025
23 July 2025

We are approaching the 4th edition of the Global Data Lab Best Thesis Prize. Submission are open until August 31st, 2025.

We welcome submissions of BA and MA theses that use Global Data Lab (GDL) data in their analysis. We give out two prizes for the most original 2025 theses analyzing GDL data in creative ways, one for the best BA and one for the best MA thesis. The winners will be announced by mid-November 2025 and will be honored with a certificate.

If you are interested in participating in the GDL best thesis competition, please submit the final version of your thesis by August 31st to info@globaldatalab.org and Natascha Wagner.

Submission for the best thesis prize also offers students the opportunity to feature their thesis on the GDL homepage along with the research of other BA and MA students from inside Radboud University and beyond, see for example our last year’s MA thesis winner Zeinab Hassano from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. For more information, check out earlier student submissions and the winning theses from 2024 and 2023.

Christine Mohrmann stipends awarded
7 April 2025

On Thursday of last week, several outstanding researchers were awarded the Christine Mohrmann stipend from Radboud University. This prestigious stipend, valued at EUR 6,000 per recipient, aims to support and encourage promising female PhD candidates in advancing their academic careers. Global Data Lab is especially pleased to announce that Anne Lieke Ebbers, who is co-supervised by Natascha Wagner and Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez, and affiliated with our team, has been selected as one of the recipients. Anne Lieke's research focuses on critical issues such as early marriage, child labour, and sexual exploitation. She intends to use the grant to complement her current work through field research in Africa.

Congrats to all winners, and in particular to Anne Lieke. We are proud of you. Keep pushing frontiers.

Thanks to Nijmegen School of Management for supporting Anne Lieke.

GDL MA Thesis Prize 2024 has been awarded
18 March 2025

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.

Revamped homepage
12 March 2025

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:

GDL BA Thesis Prize 2024 has been awarded
19 December 2024

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!

GDL BA Thesis Prize 2023 has been awarded
6 February 2024

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.

GDL MA Thesis Prize 2023 has been awarded
5 February 2024

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.