NED grantee Code for Pakistan addresses COVID-19 with better data

On Friday, March 27, civic-tech NGO Code for Pakistan (CfP) was among the some 400 NGOs to receive grant support from the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Board of Directors.  A NED grantee since 2014, CfP has used NED support to strengthen civic engagement and promote transparency and accountability through the use of technology. The group has organized civic hackathons, fellowship programs, and facilitated the development of open source civic applications that strengthen collaboration and information-sharing between citizens and the government. Now CfP continues their mission by providing clear and accessible information on coronavirus to the people of Pakistan. (Read more about NED’s work in Pakistan.

NED received a recent report from CfP communications director Sahar Habib:

“For the past few weeks, Code for Pakistan’s core team of employees and volunteer coders have been working with the Government of Pakistan’s Digital Pakistan team to develop a COVID-19 Dashboard to ensure data about the spread of COVID-19 is accessible to citizens in a clear and timely manner.  We have also helped to streamline and simplify the data entry process and improve existing infrastructure for data collection on COVID-19 cases for Pakistan’s National Institute of Health, as the NIH’s data feeds into the dashboard.

A Facebook Chat Bot, developed by the Digital Pakistan team and Botsify for the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations, & Coordination, is also using an API (application programming interface) that CfP created on top of the dashboard. CfP also developed its risk calculator logic.

We continue to provide support to the Digital Pakistan team, brainstorming and planning with them on other potential short-term and long-term initiatives to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. We also brought on various organizations to help fight this epidemic through digital solutions, including Emumba and Red Buffer who are providing human resources and software development services free of cost.

We continue to help with ideation of more solutions with many more organizations, including UNDP and IBM as we play our part to eliminate this pandemic from not just Pakistan, but from the entire world.” 

About Code for Pakistan:

Code for Pakistan is a non-profit working to bridge the gap in how the public sector uses technology to meet citizens’ needs. In addition to CfP’s core team, it mobilizes a significant volunteer network of professionals to work on a variety of tech and digital initiatives geared towards improved government efficiency, increasing trust between citizens and government, and capacity building within government. CfP also works on tech projects geared towards positive civic and social impact, through collaborations with the government, NGOs, and other civil society organizations. Privacy is built into CfP’s code of ethics and CfP does not help governments on surveillance of citizens or applications that may violate personal privacy.