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Advances in data science, machine learning and predictive technologies offer organizations working to protect democratic freedoms unprecedented opportunities to leverage data to achieve their mission, scale their work and help build a more just and equitable world. In response to recent discourse and policy in the U.S. targeting vulnerable groups and threatening our democratic institutions, we’re launching five new DataCorps projects and will be hosting a DataDive focused on these important issues.  

If philanthropic giving helps fuel social change, how can we increase it? This was one of many questions we dove into alongside the 92nd Street Y, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and over 100 data science volunteers at a New York DataDive held at Facebook this past March.

Thanks to support from the Rita Allen Foundation, we are pleased to share our Labs Blueprint, a new resource documenting our learnings and approach from our first Labs project using data science to improve traffic safety in three U.S. cities.

Cultivated by about five million households, wheat is an important crop in Ethiopia as both a source of income for small farmers and a source of food and nutrition for millions of Ethiopians. Despite the country’s huge potential to grow wheat, the average wheat productivity of 2.5 tonnes per hectare is lower than the global average of 3 tonnes per hectare. This is due in part to recurrent outbreaks of a fungal disease called wheat rust that causes devastating pre-harvest losses.

Guest Post by Andrew Brooks, DataKind DC Core Leader and Data Ambassador

Photograph by Sven Laqua

This week we celebrated a new DataKind hoilday.