New Database for Indicators On Gaza

The Pal Indicators Hub provides a great source for data on Gaza and promises to build out with even more data on the West Bank and Palestine overall, bringing crucial information about this conflict zone to the world.

Anyone that works with large international datasets knows that there are some places in the world where it is very hard to get data: small countries, conflict zones, countries that lack recognition from multilateral organizations like the UN. For countries with small populations organizations that rely on expert assessment often struggle to find experts to assess them, like Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru Naoero (I know you all are still fixing that one in your databases). These small islands are often missing in datasets which rely on the Varieties of Democracy indicators which don't include many small islands and rely on expert assessments. Conflict zones often face challenges particularly for household surveys which need to reach representative samples of the population, which is why datasets are often missing Syria, Somalia, South Sudan, and the like. Other datasets only include countries that have sufficient international recognition, excluding places like Western Sahara, Kosovo, Taiwan, Transnistria, and more. Any one of these features decreases the likelihood that a given country will have data in a dataset, and this causes endless problems for those of us who need data that covers all countries.

Palestine falls in the center of this Venn diagram. While it has a population that hits seven figures, (which is more than many small islands can say), it is certainly an active conflict zone, and despite being a member of some UN organizations, lacks official UN member status. It also faces the challenge that many datasets divide the West Bank and Gaza into two separate places, making aggregation or comparison challenging. This means that anyone looking to get data on Palestine faces significant hurdles.

Today we are featuring a website which is trying to address these hurdles: PAL Indicators. They have over 1,000 datapoints about the Gaza strip, ranging from social services and humanitarian support, to the economy and governance. The website is very new and still being built out, so they currently only have data for Gaza, but hope to expand to include data for the West Bank as well soon. The site features cards with short snippets of data points with sources and information about the trend or the impact of those data points.

The site currently lacks good comparisons with other datasets or linkages to international benchmarks which could allow folks who are trying to fill the gaps in their datasets to use this as a resource to complete those datasets, but they have committed to working to add more of these data to their platform as well as visualizations to showcase the data in new and different ways. All in all, an interesting project to watch for anyone looking to get data for difficult places.

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