Data for Children Collaborative

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.  

Evolving from a unique partnership with UNICEF, the Scottish Government and the University of Edinburgh’s Data Driven Innovation Programme, with an initial three-year funded period, the Data for Children Collaborative has advanced to becoming a specialist unit, now working with a range of collaborators. We continue to deliver projects with our original partners, UNICEF and the Scottish Government, and seek to extend our range of challenge owners to broaden our impact.

In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, where data is a driving force, and evidence is vital to decision making, we want to use data responsibly to produce demand-driven insights for real-world impact on the world’s children. Our goal is to leverage the right data and the right expertise from our ever-growing community in order to address existing problems for children using innovative data and data science techniques.  

Since our inception in September 2019, we have developed a catalogue of innovative systematic approaches that now see us bringing together the appropriate data, skills and expertise to answer a challenge question from our partners, across a number of child-centric themes.