On the second day of Dashboard week, we were provided the opportunity to create an informative dashboard using UNICEF data.
As a non-expert in child welfare, I spent the first few hour of the day reading recent publications and journal articles from UNICEF. I was most intrigued by the issue of Child Labor. I stumbled upon an article from a child reporter from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It nearly brought to me to tears.
Tychique reported on a ceremony where children from mining communities were finally birth certificates. Some of them were between 10 and 17 years old. The efforts behind this celebration are supported by UNICEF under two key Sustainable Development Goals:
- SDG Goal 16.9: By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration indicator 16.9.1 Proportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age.
- Indicator 17.19.2 Proportion of countries that (a) have conducted at least one population and housing census in the last 10 years; and (b) have achieved 100 per cent birth registration and 80 per cent death registration.
Source: Directly quoted from United Nations Legal Identity Agenda
This blog includes:
The tools I used to do this:
- Tableau Desktop
- Alteryx Designer
- Tableau Prep
At the end of this blog, I reflect on Areas of Improvement for this project and the next.
Designing the dashboard
Gathering requirements based on a new idea
As I researched, I knew that I wanted to layout my dashboard as a birth certificate. So, I chose to lead with design before downloading the data. This would be a first.
I reviewed the visualizations UNICEF already made for their 2013 and 2019 reports. I used my knowledge of [data viz best practices](Future Blog Post) and a chart types guide decide how I wanted to represent their findings.
Then, I asked: How are birth certificates designed?
Data Collection
Accessing the data form UNICEF's Data Warehouse
The web-based query system was relatively easy to use. I was able to output as a long Excel file. One row of data represented a country and a combination of dimensions. Data observations come were available from 2014 to 2022.
I used an Alteryx flow to investigate these combinations for each chart. Here are the challenges I ran into for each:
- Country Hexbin Map: Create a Country? field to exclude World and Regional observation rows and a Region field for the parameter action. Being careful of names with punctuation and parentheses. I also related the original dataset with each country's lat/lon.
- Region Radar Bar Chart: Aggregate, duplicate data, then add a field that is 360 * MAX VALUE% (Luckily, I am working with a dataset where the max value is 100%)
- National Goals Dual Axis Chart: At the time of building, I had yet to query the National Goals for 2030.
The other charts were fairly straight-forward and I finished building them before lunch.
Building the dashboard
Descriptive Title in Software/Tool
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