Interactive dashboard for rural areas
About this good practice
To get the understanding why policy makers are not assessing regional impacts Ministry of Regional Affairs and Agriculture went through interviews with different policy makers and tried to understand the key issues with completing impact assessments. The interviews revealed that the challenges lied less with timing and more with data. In some instances, there was “not enough” data, and in others it was just “too complex” and solutions were found before the ex-ante assessment was completed.
To resolve the gap for data, we started to collect data from public databases to map the situation of rural areas. Agriculture and Registries Information Board (ARIB), as paying agency, had former knowledge of interactive dashboards. In collaboration we started to develop a new dashboard for rural areas. Data for the dashboard is collected from Estonian Statistics, Real property price statistics, Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund and from other open databases. It includes main data for rural areas regarding demography, employment and enterprises, real estate prices and income.
This tool offers benefits to the customer, based on information from different data sources and data models. This is a service based on the valorisation of data. It can be used freely by everyone, policy makers, stakeholders, local governments, researchers etc to easily find main data about rural areas and specific regions.
Resources needed
PowerBI or similar program with licenses and open data. Human resource to find suitable open data to integrate and develop rural areas interactive dashboard in PowerBi. After the development process, no further resources are needed as the dashboard will update automatically if base data is updated.
Evidence of success
Rural interactive dashboard is used when assessing impacts for rural areas and policy making decision to understand the situation of rural areas. Additionally high officials, ministers etc are using it before on situ visits, to understand the situation of different rural areas. We are using this also as a monitoring tool for our mid-term review of Agriculture and Fisheries development plan 2030. Based on this dashboard over 10 other specific dashboards are developed.
Potential for learning or transfer
Interactive dashboard is something that is quite common and easy to implement, so it is suitable for all regions and institutions. You will need PowerBI license and appropriate data. For data there are two options, you can use your own collected data or you can use openly accessible data. We have seen that primarily interactive dashboards based on internal collected data are developed, where many institutions are developing their own dashboards (for example monitoring the progress of state budget or implementation of ESI funds) for internal and external use.
Interactive dashboard can play important role in our work plans. It has the potential to replace traditional excel based static figures and graphs to simplify the everyday of policy makers. Alternatively it is a easy and informative way to publish information and progress for wider audience. Another plus is if you connect the base data correctly and update it, there is no need to manually update the dashboard.
Further information
Good practice owner
You can contact the good practice owner below for more detailed information.