Asia-Pacific Stats Café Series: Data Values - Building inclusive and open data systems for greater agency

Ms. Beaven has over thirty years of experience in government statistics, in particular data preparation and analysis.  She has also worked extensively with governments, multilateral agencies and the statistical community, most notably through the United Nations Statistics Division, ECA, ESCAP, World Bank and Paris21.

Prior to joining SD, Ms. Beaven led the Data for Development Team at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom, where she managed a global portfolio of statistical programmes to build core statistics as well as helped countries modernize their statistical systems.  She was also a leading advocate for financing for data and statistics.

Ms. Beaven has provided a wide range of technical support, from improving economic and financial statistics to estimating local population using geospatial data.  She is one of the founders of the Inclusive Data Charter, launched at the 2018 High-Level Political Forum, to mobilize political commitments and to advance inclusive and disaggregated data.  Ms. Beaven also led a programme on monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals with United Nations Statistics Division and established a data science hub with the Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom to explore use of data science, in particular geospatial as well as big data, to monitor progress.

Ms. Beaven holds Master’s degrees in Statistical Applications in Business and Government as well as Business Administration, and a Bachelor’s degree in Geography and Geology.

Bipana Dhakal is a young change maker from Nepal. She is enthusiastic about quality education, youth empowerment and rural community development. She is the founder of The Learning Fortress, an initiative that creates non-formal teaching and learning environments in rural communities of Nepal. She is a GenEndIt Youth Ambassador advocating in the field of SRHR, CSE and HIV AIDS. She is also a WEDU Rising Star 2021, YouthxPolicymakers Ambassador 2021, a Data Values Enthusiast and RIVET Designer.

Mr. Keshab Kumar Gautam has been working in the National Statistics Office (NSO) of Nepal for more than two decades. He is presently overseeing the population statistics section of the NSO as a director. The population section manages activities required mainly for the decennial population censuses and other population statistics in the country and the latest of the series is the 12th round of national population and housing census that was conducted in November 2021.

In the early days of his career Mr. Gautam was deputed to the district level statistics office for some years, where he gained experience in managing and supervising various data collection activities in the field. During his career, he also worked in agriculture, poverty, labor force, price and dissemination related sections of the NSO. Mr. Gautam has acquired graduate level studies in statistics from Tribhuwan University, Nepal and University of New South Wales, Australia. He has also participated in a number of international trainings, workshops and seminars and facilitated numerous national level training as well. His main interest is in data analysis and communicating statistics, especially to non-statisticians.

Karen Bett is a Senior Policy Manager at the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. She works on advancing the Global Partnership's policy work on data equity and inclusion and supports the strengthening of foundational data systems and leads the organization’s work in the administrative data collaborative and our work on citizen-generated data. Karen has spent over 10 years working in international development, and before joining the Global Partnership, led technical analysis at Development Initiatives, Africa office. She completed her MA in Economics, specializing in health economics and public finance, at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Mayuri is a writer and gender activist and educator from India. She works on gender sensitization with communities through action research and is interested in data from margins. She is keen to bring knowledge of language, gender, caste, and ethnicity from the margins to the mainstream. Mayuri has a Masters in Literature from Mumbai University.

Joon Baek is an advocate for data privacy, digital surveillance, youth empowerment and has experience working in artificial intelligence. Originally from Korea and now based in New York City, Joon is a software engineer at Google. Before joining Google, Joon served in the Republic of Korea army, working in the demilitarized zone between the South and North Korean borders. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Physics at Columbia University. Through Data Values, Joon hopes to create a data future that is fair, equitable and just.