The Data Lab for Statistical Innovation

Official statistical systems are facing difficulties posed by reduced budgets, cultural changes and new competitors on the market, which create data gaps as a consequence. Such gaps are widened by emergency contexts, when having access to timely information is very important. The FAO is adapting to this crisis of the traditional data collection systems by modernizing the statistical business process through the activities of the Data Lab for Statistical Innovation. Read more…

DataLab products

Social unrest analysis tool

A platform that visualizes social mood trends for each country, identified through the analysis of the tweets published by newspapers' accounts from 150 countries.

Covid-19 impact analysis

©FAO/Max Valencia

The Covid-19 impact analysis tool gathers, organises and analyses daily information on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and agriculture, value chains, food prices, food security and undertaken measures.

News search

©FAO/Alessia Pierdomenico / FAO

A searchable platform for news related to food value chains issues. News can be filtered by language, commodity, country and topic (Covid-19, social unrest, food losses and waste, government response...).

Daily food prices

©FAO/Karen Minasyan

The Data Lab harvests food prices data daily from Numbeo.com and from the FAO’s Food Price Monitoring and Analysis website. Visualizations show price changes per country and per commodity.

DataLab areas of work

Filling gaps of statistical data

The Data Lab collects data at the national and sub-national levels to fill the data gaps of the National Statistical Systems. Click here to read more about this topic area. See initial results on sub-national agricultural production data. See also daily prices collected from alternative sources.

Analysis of (social) media

Most frequent words in newspapers' media coverage and tweets about food value chain disruptions. Click here to read more about this area of work. Check our media coverage page, the daily news digests, the Covid-19 impact analysis tool and the social unrest analysis tool based on tweets and news data.

Analysis of legislation and policies

The Data Lab uses text mining to analyse agricultural policy documents stored in FAOLEX. Click here to learn more about this topic area. See the analytical tool on the use of agricultural statistics in policy.

Use of geo-spatial data in agriculture statistics

The integration between statistical and geospatial data is fundamental to improve the monitoring of global development outcomes. Click here to learn more about this topic area.