D4DInsights: 2025 Year in Review

2024 was a year of deepening impact, maturing partnerships, and moving from concept to implementation across the D4DInsights portfolio. Our work reinforced a core belief that has guided us since the beginning: data only delivers value when it is embedded in institutions, trusted by stakeholders, and translated into real-world decisions.

Across regions and sectors, we focused on strengthening the foundations that allow countries to use data more effectively—through shared platforms, governance frameworks, capacity development, and emerging decision-intelligence approaches.

Strengthening Data Sharing for Climate Action

A major focus this year was advancing data sharing for climate action in partnership with the World Bank. With support from our partner, Development Gateway, we led the design and application of a comprehensive country readiness diagnostic tool, examining governance, data availability and quality, institutional capacity, digital infrastructure, technology, and stakeholder engagement.

Workshop participants from the Government of the Maldives

This work was applied through in-depth consultations and national workshops in the Maldives and Sierra Leone, engaging ministries, agencies, and state-owned enterprises across climate, environment, disaster risk, energy, planning, and digital sectors. These engagements surfaced not only technical gaps, but also the institutional and cultural dynamics that shape how data is shared—or withheld—in practice.

The result was a set of implementation-ready roadmaps aligned with national digital transformation agendas, now guiding the next phase of platform development, policy design, and institutional reform.

Advancing Digital Earth Pacific toward Operations

2024 also marked a pivotal year for Digital Earth Pacific (DEP), as the program transitioned from platform development toward operational maturity. Working closely with the Pacific Community (SPC) and regional partners, D4DInsights, along

with our partners at Geoneon and Sparkgeo, supported DEP across technical, institutional, and strategic dimensions.

Key contributions included advancing product development and validation for coastline change, water observations, vegetation height, mangroves and seagrass mapping. A key milestone was progress on the coastline change dashboard, designed to translate complex time-series data into actionable insights for planners and decision-makers.  Alongside technical delivery, we supported capacity development, country engagement, governance processes, communications, and fundraising—helping position DEP as a scalable regional digital public good for climate resilience and sustainable land and ocean management across the Pacific.

Coastline change dashboard indicating hotspots and potential impact.

Strengthening National Statistics and SDG Data in Tonga

In parallel, Karen Chavez led our work with SPC’s Statistics for Development Division under the PACSTAT program to support national statistical capacity and SDG-aligned indicators in Tonga.

This work focused on improving data collection methods, statistical indicators, and institutional processes to address persistent data gaps affecting national planning and SDG reporting. Through structured assessments, technical support, and capacity-building activities, we worked closely with the Tonga Statistics Department to pilot improved approaches that are practical, sustainable, and aligned with regional best practices.

The engagement underscored the importance of foundational national statistics as a cornerstone of evidence-based decision-making—complementing broader digital and geospatial initiatives across the Pacific.

From Roadmaps to Implementation in the Maldives                                            

Building on earlier diagnostic work, D4DInsights was selected to provide advisory and strategic guidance to support implementation of the Data Sharing Platform for Climate Action and Resilience in the Maldives under the Digital Maldives project. This marks a transition from planning into execution.

Maldives co-design workshop on data sharing governance and policy

Our role spans strategic and technical advisory support across procurement, governance design, national data sharing policy development, capacity building, and sustained stakeholder engagement—ensuring the platform is scalable, interoperable, and institutionally embedded.

Shaping the Global Conversation on NSDI

At the global level, we led the development of a major research paper on the State of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The research examined how countries are modernizing NSDI—moving from static systems toward dynamic, federated, and intelligent geospatial ecosystems that increasingly form part of national digital public infrastructure.  You can access the research paper and case studies from https://sdimodernization.ogc.org/NSDIs-Around-the-World/.

AI Enabled Resiliency

We also partnered with Stanford University on next-generation approaches to country resilience and decision intelligence, including transformative work on AI-enabled platforms. More to come on this in 2026!

Growing the Team and Partnerships

To support a growing portfolio, we expanded the D4DInsights team and deepened partnerships with institutions including the World Bank, Pacific Community, Stanford University, Open Geospatial Consortium and the Maldives Ministry of Defense and Technology, while also joining the UNFCCC Climate Technology Centre & Network (CTCN). New technical partnerships with Geoneon, Sparkgeo, Development Seed, Development Gateway and the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA) strengthened our delivery capacity across geospatial analytics, custom applications, infrastructure at scale and policy.

Looking Ahead

As we move forward, our focus is on delivering data-driven insights at scale—ensuring that digital platforms and data systems translate into meaningful impact on climate action, sustainability, and resilience. This means supporting countries and institutions to operationalize, integrate, and scale data products and analytics within national digital transformation agendas, institutional workflows, and policy processes.

In the year ahead, we will prioritize scaling proven approaches—connecting data across sectors, strengthening governance and accountability, and building the human and institutional capacity required to use data effectively. Equally important is translating complex information into decision-ready insights that inform policy, investment, and action, particularly in climate-vulnerable and resource-constrained contexts.

Across all of this, our commitment remains the same: to help countries and organizations move from fragmented data landscapes toward trusted, interoperable, and decision-ready ecosystems that drive resilience, sustainability, and inclusive development at scale.