Statistics without Borders

Gary Shapiro, Statistics without Borders Chair

Serving as a volunteer on an international health project can be a personally rewarding and satisfying experience.

Statistics without Borders is an apolitical group that was formed in late 2008 to provide pro bono statistical support to organizations involved in not-for-profit international health (broadly defined) efforts. The goal of the group is to achieve better statistical practice, including statistical analysis and design of experiments and surveys. To that end, there are about 250 members from many countries, far exceeding expectations.

While SWB members have a wide range of expertise, most projects so far have involved survey planning and/or analysis of survey data. Most work has been done through email, but there have been occasional trips to developing countries. Following are a few examples of SWB projects:

• SWB assisted the company SciMetrika with a cell phone survey to assess the economic impact of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The specific goals were to estimate the employment and housing status of the Haitian population. SWB volunteers visited Haiti to begin the planning and are now analyzing the survey results. This work was featured on National Public Radio.
• Each year, the Food and Nutritional Technical Assistance II (FANTA-2) project at the Academy for Educational Development reviews and provides comments about baseline survey plans for newly awarded food security programs in developing countries funded by USAID’s Office of Food for Peace. For the last two years, SWB volunteers have served as statistical reviewers of these plans.
• SWB helped prepare a proposal for the Inter-American Development Bank to survey households in Mexico about their use of bottled water. SWB was extensively involved in the early planning and assisted with the general sample design and questionnaire.
• SWB is working on a long-term project with UNICEF to evaluate health interventions in Sierra Leone. SWB assisted with the design of the baseline survey, data cleaning, and survey weighting. Ongoing work will include data analysis and planning for a post-intervention survey. An unsolicited comment from our main UNICEF contact follows: “… [your SWB volunteer] did an outstanding job. I could not have done it without her. She was so patient with cleaning the data and dealing with unexpected problems related to revisits. …”
• KOMAZA works with farmers in Kenya to promote the planting of Eucalyptus trees. They sought SWB assistance to assess the social and economic impact of their program over time. SWB volunteers helped KOMAZA plan a baseline survey. They proposed a stratified sample design, recommended a sample size to achieve the desired reliability, advised on training sessions for nonresponse follow up (enumerator training sessions), and advised on the conduct of the survey.

It is clear from these examples that many organizations in the United States and other countries would benefit greatly from statistical consulting and support, but cannot afford to pay for it. SWB is particularly eager to spread the word of its services to organizations that can use statistical help. Please email me at g.shapiro4@verizon.net if you know of any such organization.

Serving as a volunteer on an international health project can be a personally rewarding and satisfying experience. SWB volunteer Sowmya Rao said, “The most gratifying part … was teaching the statisticians from Sierra Leone techniques to analyze data since they were very enthusiastic, eager to learn, and appreciative of the opportunity to be part of the project beyond data collection.” The dedication of so many SWB volunteers who have worked on projects is quite astounding. ASA can be proud of its far reach.

Learn more about the organization at the SWB website.