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Communities are disengaged – citizen voice is not harnessed in any form except media and forums. Public agencies have few mechanisms of connecting with citizens, and there is a lack of a channel to enable data driven decisions.
That’s when Prukalpa Sankar and Varun Banka set an ambitious goal. They wanted to solve complex social problems with data intelligence. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision for Sankar and Banka when they decided to set up a data intelligence company - SocialCops in India in 2013.“In spite of increasing digitization of data and its availability; businesses and organizations have found it difficult to create value out of it. In the developing world, the biggest bottleneck with data is data itself. This is when we realized that the power of data combined with technology can solve some real problems,” explains Prukalpa Sankar, ?co-founder of New Delhi based data intelligence company SocialCops.
Getting to the bottom of the pyramid
Take the case of a large philanthropic organization that wanted to make investments to improve the quality of life of small and marginal farmers in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. They needed to decide which districts they could intervene to make the maximum impact.
“They used Access and Visualize on our platform to access our data about agriculture, nutrition, and female empowerment, explore the secondary data visually, and make a decision that would have otherwise taken them over six months,” says Varun Banka, co-founder, SocialCops.
In the initial stages, SocialCops found that very few organizations collect data. And the ones that do so gather it in paper format. “Data that does make it to the digital format is often in local languages, are in PDF formats, which means you cannot extract data for analysis purposes,” says Sankar.
The company found that a lot of decisions that were being made in the world were not being done on the basis of real-time updated data. That’s when it decided to built a data exchange that has myriad uses—from governments deciding healthcare allocations or a marketer pondering which villages a brand of toothpaste should be introduced.
A base layer of data was created by tapping internal organizational systems that existed in silos. Data from these systems were pulled out and now forms the base layer of their intelligent platform. An additional layer of context was added to the base layer through external information.
“In places where data didn’t exist, we started to deploy an app that works without an internet, in local languages that can be used by locals to collect two data points a day,” says Sankar. For example, about 50,000 people in Jarmundi, Jharkhand use SocialCop’s Android app to regularly and dynamically collect and create data that has never been created before.
The core platform leverages machine learning tools that filters and cleans the data to process and analyze it at scale and get valuable insights. “This data is visualized through interactive and easy to use dashboards that a decision maker can quickly understand and identify the problem and take corrective measures,” says Sankar.
SocialCops is currently being used by more than 150 organizations around the world to run baseline surveys, create real-time monitoring systems, make strategic investment decisions, and generate insights to make better data-driven decisions. It has built around 600 public data sources in India and around 32 other countries across the globe. Human sensors feed the company data on a real-time basis through its app, Collect.
“While growing up, we always saw some problems that were not solved for ages. The beauty of our platform is that if we solve a problem once, we solve it for life,” says Banka.
