My name is Ottilia Scott, and I am completing a Bachelor of Arts in Joint Honours Political Science and International Development Studies (IDS). My research interests include good governance, open data, and data governance, as well as decolonization and indigeneity. Thanks to the Faculty of Arts Internship Award, I had the opportunity this summer to intern remotely at the Center for Democratic Development based in Accra, Ghana. CDD-Ghana is a research and policy think tank working to advance democracy, good governance, and inclusive development outcomes in Ghana. Its mission is to bridge the gap between research and policy practice. In doing so, the organization aims to advance inclusive democratic governance and promote human and social development outcomes. I wanted to work at this organization for over two years now. I was supposed to travel to Accra in 2020, but the plan was cancelled due to the pandemic. I applied for this internship in order to deepen my understanding of citizen participation and to connect with researchers in the field of democratic governance and social inclusion.
During my internship at CDD, I conducted data visualization, reviewed guides for policymakers and project managers, wrote impact evaluation guidelines, and one policy brief. More specifically, I wrote a summative impact evaluation guide for the non-partisan 鈥淚 AM AWARE鈥� citizen empowerment campaign, and a formative impact evaluation guide for the Evidence for Development (E4D) pilot project. The purpose of the summative evaluation was to examine whether the project outcomes could be achieved in other contexts. The formative evaluation was used to determine which specific intervention mechanisms was the most effective in achieving the intended outcomes. The goal of this latter exercise was to improve or strengthen the implementation of a program. Writing these documents was positively challenging and made me realize how difficult it is to evaluate causality with limited resources.
Throughout the summer, I was primarily involved in the E4D project. I conducted literature reviews on communities of practice and mapped out district-level data on various development topics. To this latter end, I learned the basics of ArcGIS software and used existing GIS maps of Ghana to locate specific community data points. I further completed a policy brief, which explored the public value of open government data as a lever for innovation, as well as the key barriers to achieving these results in Ghana. After working on a policy brief for the first time, I am confident that it has sharpened my analytical and research skills. I was also excited to work on this project as I plan to specialize in data governance research in the future. I would say that this was the highlight of my internship because I am truly passionate about it. My supervisor has even suggested that we expand on this policy brief to co-write an article and submit it to a journal.
Overall, I can say that my experience at CDD was very rewarding, and I truly feel that it contributed to my intellectual development. My work there deepened my understanding of causality and of the challenges of putting theory to practice. I am particularly grateful that I had the opportunity to experiment with ArcGIS and mapping out data points. I am now thinking about sharpening those skills by taking GIS courses at the university. Conducting desk research for the policy brief also significantly enhanced my understanding of open data and of ways to engage non-governmental stakeholders in data sharing. I would say that this internship has been one of the greatest moments of my undergraduate university experience: it has helped me choose my path for graduate school. Moreover, I am now confident that I want to conduct research on data governance in the future.
