8 1.2 WHAT IS THIS REPORT’S APPROACH? BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The Asia Foundation has been providing technical support in townships across Myanmar for several years. This has included support for better policymaking in a number of areas, including tax collection, garbage collection, local planning, and urban safety.11 As part of these efforts, Foundation staff have worked alongside township officials to navigate the local data ecosystem and improve data quality and utilization—from collection, to storage, to analysis. These efforts have included technological solutions to improve data quality and the efficiency and effectiveness of the data ecosystem. Through this support, the Foundation has gained some insight into the opportunities and challenges faced by township administrations, and invaluable experience in supporting sustainable reforms that effect positive change. Based on international good practice and its own experience in township-level data use and the local data ecosystem, The Asia Foundation has produced this brief report for policymakers in Myanmar who are considering how to achieve a more efficient and effective data ecosystem with useful and trusted data at its core. With this objective in mind, the report addresses three key questions: 1. What is the current local data ecosystem in Myanmar, and how is data collected, stored, used and analyzed, and governed at the local level? 2. What are the challenges and opportunities facing the local data ecosystem? 3. How can Myanmar’s local data ecosystem respond to these challenges and make the most of opportunities presented by digital data collection, storage, use and analysis, and governance? METHODOLOGY, SCOPE, AND LIMITATIONS The evidence base for this report is largely drawn from The Asia Foundation’s experience in 14 townships across seven states and regions, where much of the Foundation’s work has been to support township officials in strengthening data collection, storage, use, and analysis. It reflects more than four years of direct implementation of multiple software platforms in partnership with several local ICT companies and more than a dozen government departments. To supplement this evidence base, we conducted a review of the literature on data in Myanmar and good international practices in developing data systems. This brief report does not seek to be a comprehensive and systematic review of Myanmar’s local data ecosystem. Rather, it is largely a reflection on the Foundation’s experiences, and offers insights for policymakers and other development partners providing technical support on data. As The Asia Foundation’s support has focused on the township level, where the bulk of data in Myanmar is collected, and on supporting township officials to make better use of data in decision-making, this paper focuses on the “local” data ecosystem—that is to say, the data ecosystem at the township level and below, rather than at the state/region or Union levels. This report looks explicitly at the distinctive local data ecosystem of the government of Myanmar, and not that of competing or alternative governance systems and institutions, which have their own systems of data collection, storage, and use and analysis. REPORT OUTLINE Following this introductory chapter, chapter 2 outlines Myanmar’s current local data ecosystem, with details on data management and governance, collection, storage, and use and analysis, and identifying challenges and opportunities in the existing ecosystem. Chapter 3 analyzes the potential future development of the local data ecosystem and considers in particular the potential digitalization of the ecosystem.