Using Data Responsibly to Improve Outcomes for Every Child

The Data for Children Collaborative is a specialist unit within the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh.

Our mission is to provide the best conditions for bringing together the right data and the right expertise to improve outcomes for every child.

We build innovative ways of enabling impactful collaborations between academia, the third, the public and the private sectors and delivering projects responsibly.

We bring together diverse expertise and the appropriate data from our community to address complex problems facing children. 

We work with a range of partners to identify demand-driven challenges that require a data-driven solution. 

All of our projects are child-focused and work towards one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals and/or the National Performance Framework.  

Our News

Featured
Data for Children Collaborative Annual Report 2024: Building a Lasting Impact through Tools, Methods, and a Legacy of Change.
Data for Children Collaborative Annual Report 2024: Building a Lasting Impact through Tools, Methods, and a Legacy of Change.

2024 was another year of progress across our portfolio at Data for Children Collaborative. The wide variety of our activities tells a story of how versatile and transferable Data for Children's Collaborative approaches, tools, and methods are.

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Data for Children Collaborative Poverty Team Expands Geospatial Innovation with Scalable Travel Time Maps for the Entire Continent of Africa
Data for Children Collaborative Poverty Team Expands Geospatial Innovation with Scalable Travel Time Maps for the Entire Continent of Africa

Our collaborative team, led by Dr. Gary Watmough from the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, developed a scalable solution for generating travel maps that uses only free open data, allowing it to be applied to any country in the World.

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Data for Children Collaborative Launches Collaborative Project with The Promise Scotland and Partners Examining How to Overcome Barriers in Data and Information Sharing
Data for Children Collaborative Launches Collaborative Project with The Promise Scotland and Partners Examining How to Overcome Barriers in Data and Information Sharing

A new, a transdisciplinary, collaborative project with The Promise Scotland and partners to understand and overcome the legal, technical, and cultural barriers to data and information sharing relating to care experienced children, young people and their families across public sector agencies and organisations in Scotland.  

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Data for Children Collaborative Winner of the 2024 DataIQ Award for Best Ethical Data Initiative
Data for Children Collaborative Winner of the 2024 DataIQ Award for Best Ethical Data Initiative

At the Data for Children Collaborative, we have been continuously developing and refining our Responsible Innovation framework to support challenge-led, multi-sectoral collaborative data projects that aim to improve children's lives

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Our Service Catalogue

We work with partners on an end-to-end challenge or support specific activities.

Having crafted a set of approaches, frameworks and methodologies to work on complex challenges, we aim to share these far and wide. We have designed a service offering to work on an end-to-end challenge with a partner, or to apply component parts of our service to specific situations.  

Get in touch if you would like to hear more!

Our Themes

Our Projects

Our Work in Focus

Outputs
Case Study: How Our Processes Allowed for a Reimagining of End Violence Lab’s Multi-Country Study
Case Study: How Our Processes Allowed for a Reimagining of End Violence Lab’s Multi-Country Study

This case study outlines how Data for Children Collaborative’s processes allowed for a reimagining of the End of Violence multi-country study to bring in the voices of youth.

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Case Study: How We Facilitated a Collaborative Solution for UNICEF to Better Understand Child Poverty
Case Study: How We Facilitated a Collaborative Solution for UNICEF to Better Understand Child Poverty

This case study explains how the Data for Children Collaborative Facilitated a Collaborative Solution for UNICEF to Support them in Exploring Ways to Better Understand Access to Child Services.

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Case Study: How We Built the Right Team to Map Data for The Promise Scotland
Case Study: How We Built the Right Team to Map Data for The Promise Scotland

This case study shows how the Data for Children Collaborative helped The Promise Scotland build the right team to map diverse care system data.

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Case Study: How we Refined the Challenge for UNICEF’s Child Climate Risk Index
Case Study: How we Refined the Challenge for UNICEF’s Child Climate Risk Index

This case study explains how the Data for Children Collaborative supported UNICEF in better understanding the risks so that countries have more evidence to build their capacity and resilience to help children around the globe and into the future.

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Case Study: How Collaboration Helped Highlight the Importance of Lived Experiences in Understanding Sports Activity in Scotland
Case Study: How Collaboration Helped Highlight the Importance of Lived Experiences in Understanding Sports Activity in Scotland

This case study explains how the Data for Children Collaborative helped build a multidisciplinary team of experts spanning academia, the private, and public sectors to gain data-driven insights.

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Case Study: How we Collaborated with Northern Alliance to Better Understand Poverty Attainment by  Unlocking Data
Case Study: How we Collaborated with Northern Alliance to Better Understand Poverty Attainment by  Unlocking Data

This case study explains how the Data for Children Collaborative helped the Northern Alliance uncover a deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which educational attainment can be negatively affected by poverty, frame the conversation and layout logical project steps. 

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Our 2024 Annual Report

2024 was another year of progress across our portfolio at Data for Children Collaborative. The wide variety of our activities tells a story of how versatile and transferable Data for Children's Collaborative approaches, tools, and methods are. We aim to create a legacy of tools and methods to support our immediate community and many other areas where disciplines and organisations come together to address humanity's wicked problems