Versión en español

By Norma Palomino, Chief of Library Services at the Inter-American Development Bank

As we mentioned in an earlier blogpost, 84% of the population of Latin America lives in municipalities that have open government data policies. As well as this, four nations in the region—Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico and Costa Rica—were among the 70 nations ranked for the openness of their data.

Open data portals are key to promote an open ecosystem and have a huge potential to share information among citizens, government officials, and development practitioners in order to come up with innovative solutions and approaches to everyday issues.

In tune with this trend, I´m happy to share with you that the Inter-American Development Bank will launch in early 2015 “Numbers for Development”, an Open Data Portal that will give open and free access to our databases. It is aimed at researchers, students, policymakers, analysts, web developers and others working in development issues and public policy.

The goal of “Numbers for Development” is to become the main open data repository of socio-economic development data for the region. As a result, anyone will have access to data from 26 Latin American and Caribbean countries gathered by the Bank for more than 50 years. You can check out the image below for an illustrative example data from the portal.

Using the Open Data Portal, you will be able to:

1 Explore and visualize approximately two thousand indicators.

2 Navigate and download data on global integration (such as exports and imports of goods and services), social inclusion (such as education, poverty, and labor market), and macroeconomic aspects of development in the region.

3 Examine unique indicators such as Dollarization, Domestic Public Debt, Poverty Wage, and Coverage by Pensions and Social Security. Check out indicators such as Remittances, as re-defined by IDB economists.

4 Download data in .xls and .csv to share or re-use them for your own analytic work.

5 Explore your country’s data through animated and interactive visualizations, such as “Country at a Glance” report. This report features approximately 50 highlighted indicators as a snapshot of development for each country.

The portal will launch in early 2015 .The Bank is currently seeking feedback on the beta version, so anyone interested in getting early and exclusive access to the data and contributing to this project, can sign up here. Please share with us your ideas!