FAO at the UN Datathon 2023
Hybrid Event, 03/11/2023 - 06/11/2023
Following the success of the past three hackathons, the United Nations Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics (UNCEBD), Major Group for Children and Youth (MGCY), Uruguay's National Institute of Statistics, and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data hosted the "2023 UN Datathon" to contribute solutions to the challenges of the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Datathon was organized from 3-6 November in conjunction with the Festival de Datos in Uruguay (7 to 9 November 2023).
FAO's participation at the UN Datathon
Datasets from FAO were accessible by participants of the UN Datathon 2023. The datasets were made available through two tracks: Licensed data files publicly available on the Food and Agriculture Microdata Catalogue (FAM), as well as data files not publicly available, through Privacy Enhancing Technology (PETs).
For the first track, fully anonymized datasets on FAM were highlighted to participants as a data source for the Datathon participants. In this regard, the FAO Office of Chief Statistician organized a joint webinar "Unlocking food and agriculture microdata through the FAM Catalogue" together with the Global Network of Data Officers and Statisticians, to present the main FAM features and characteristics and inform participants on how to access datasets available on the catalogue.
For the second track, thanks to a great collaboration between FAO’s Office of Chief Statistician, Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) team, and Oblivious, DIEM datasets were made accessible, through PETs.
Global Network x FAO x UN Datathon Webinar: Unlocking food and agriculture microdata through the FAM Catalogue | 24 October 2023, 14:30 - 15:30
The Food and Agriculture Microdata (FAM) Catalogue was launched by the FAO in 2019 to promote increased access to food security, nutrition, and agriculture-related microdata. As of today, the FAM Catalogue hosts over 1,300 surveys and censuses, providing easy access to their relevant documentation, metadata and, in most cases, microdata. Primarily targeted to FAM current and potential users, the webinar focused on the Catalogue’s main features, its publication workflow and supporting technologies, and on the different microdata access modalities in place. During the webinar the presenters also illustrated some of the datasets available on FAM that could be used in the context of the UN Datathon 2023. To browse the full catalogue, please follow this link.