Perceiving Yemen
About the CSO
The Yemen Polling Center (YPC) is an independent research centre established in 2004. YPC aims to impact local and international policymaking with the ultimate goal to improve the living conditions of the Yemeni people. YPC are one of the few organisations in Yemen that collect rigorous datasets and are able to do national surveys despite the current conflict in the country. In 2020 they were awarded “Courage Under Fire” award from Gallup, Inc. The award was created to recognise organisations for their extraordinary data collection abilities under conflict conditions.
The team
From left to right: Tawfik (CSO representative, Yemen), Santu (data/tech, Mexico), Amr (CSO representative, Yemen), Matthew (web developer, USA), Colleen (data journalism, UK), Marwa (Team Leader, design, Lebanon), Hoda (designer, Libya)
About the topic
The questionnaire included questions about the political and economic situation in Yemen, about the daily life of youths, questions about school, university, work, vocational training, youth opinions toward local authorities, political leaders, political parties, CSOs and NGOs, questions about family, community and state, the availability of services, as well as the kinds of conflicts that exist at the local level.
A look at the data
YPC brought two datasets to the workshop. A national face-to-face survey of the youth aged 15 to 25 that included 1,500 interviewees and included questions on the security situation and media use.
The second dataset they brought was the Public Perceptions on Living Conditions and Security-Related Issues. It consisted of 4,000 responses and was conducted to understand the impact of the war on the living conditions of Yemenis.
Their objectives
The team wanted to created a project that answered these two questions:
How can we make the data more accessible to policymakers, in order to promote a local approach to state-building in Yemen?
How can we make the data more accessible to the general public, to raise awareness around the living situation of youth in Yemen today, given that Yemen receives little media attention.
Before Data4Change
Before the sprint YPC’s data visualisations took this format: a big bar chart divided by governorate and answers usually going from “good” to “bad”.
This type of visualisation makes it challenging for the viewers to read at a glance. The YPC team also said they struggled to find useful tools to visualise their (huge amounts) of polling data.
Target audience
Although local councils are often willing to help out the community but do not have all of the information about their specific area or governorate to make impactful change where Yemenis need it the most. Specifically the target audience was: Local Councils Policy Makers, Sheikhs, Political, leaders, Religious leaders and also youth in the country.
Some challenges
The situation in Yemen is dire due to the ongoing conflict. There is limited access to electricity and internet and as a result it is difficult to get new and up-to-date information inside Yemen. But despite this, Yemenis are still able to communicate with each other via WhatsApp when they have an internet connection, and they use Bluetooth on their phones to share news, stories, videos and images when they’re offline. Another challenge for the team is that the illiteracy rate in Yemen is very high, which means that any project created also had to take that into consideration.
ResultsPerceiving Yemen is a bilingual platform (Arabic and English) that lets users explore YPC’s data. It was long-listed in the Humanitarian category at the 2019 Information is Beautiful Awards.
It provides a comparative overview of life in each governorate in Yemen and gives international audiences, local leaders and ordinary citizens access to valuable information about, among other topics: security, access to medical care, electricity and internet access.
The project is available in Arabic and English.
To make the web platform more accessible for people not familiar with data visualisation, the sprint team decided to only use two data visualisation methods: scaled bubbles and a choropleth map.
For those with a lower literacy level, an audio file recorded in Arabic describes how to interpret the visualisations.
Since electricity and data are a precious commodity in Yemen, the colour scheme for Perceiving Yemen is intentionally dark, so as not to drain valuable battery life.
All of the charts are rendered entirely in code, but users can download any visualisation from the website as an image file, generated on the fly, which can then be shared with others using WhatsApp or Bluetooth.
An even more magical moment arose when Santu, the team’s data researcher and software engineer from Mexico, made it possible to download the entire site as one, single, tiny, 4.3MB file, which could then be distributed offline, again via WhatsApp or Bluetooth, without any reduction in functionality.
Screen capture of one of the hubs that the team built and its interface. Built in Mexico deployed in Yemen.
The sprint team then pieced together small hubs using Raspberry Pis to distribute to community centres and local authorities in Yemen. The hubs include a custom-built survey tool, so that YPC can push out new research and collect survey responses.
The hubs make it easier for YPC to share content and safer to collect data because it reduces the need for YPC’s researchers to travel across Yemen to survey geographically dispersed populations. When the hubs are connected to the internet, YPC can push, pull, or update content and data. Regardless of whether the hub is connected to the internet, users can always connect to it and browse or download Perceiving Yemen, or participate in a new survey that YPC has distributed into the field.
Serverless sites
The entire platform, hub, and survey creator runs on three Google Sheets, which can be accessed by anyone within the team from anywhere in the world, as long as there is an internet connection.
