PM Imran launches 'Data4Pakistan' portal today

ISLAMABAD - Prime Minister Imran Khan will launch Ehsaas District Development portal 'Data4Pakistan' today (Tuesday).

According to a press release issued by the PM Office Media Wing , "Data4Pakistan, the first initiative of its kind in the country, provides open and public access to a spatial interactive portal that has poverty estimates for every district in Pakistan, along with over 120 development and policy indicators".

The portal currently has six rounds of district poverty and development data, covering the period 2004-2018.

Part of Ehsaas strategy, the Data4Pakistan Portal has been developed in collaboration with the World Bank and will be hosted on the Ehsaas website of Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety Division: pass.gov.pk.

"Ehsaas is about the creation of a 'welfare state' by countering elite capture and leveraging 21st century tools such as using data and technology to create precision safety nets and promoting social welfare and poverty alleviation solutions. The opening of Data4Pakistan portal is another important step of the government to foster evidence-based decision making," it added.

This portal will be a very valuable resource for federal, provincial and district level policymakers, for decision making.

Interactive maps allow the user to visualize and compare districts on poverty and two additional indicators. Mousing over a district provides information on the selected indicators as a pop-up message.

The user can also select a subset of provinces or a subset of districts to focus on, using a simple drop-down list. Custom maps built by the user can be downloaded and printed.