The IDEMS Podcast

Lily and David discuss the remarkable results of a digital parenting intervention in Tanzania, recently published in The Lancet, demonstrating substantial reductions in violence against children at a fraction of the cost of traditional programmes. They reflect on IDEMS' role in developing the technology, the importance of adapting it to local communities to achieve high engagement, and how the lessons learned could help transform the way digital interventions are developed and scaled across different contexts.

Lily and David discuss upcoming workshops in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, where IDEMS will introduce new AI tools for research methods support. They explore how AI is helping create locally adapted, French-language statistics textbooks, alongside Waypoint, a new tool designed to guide users through responsible data analysis. They also reflect on how these developments have emerged from years of collaboration with research partners in West Africa and the importance of gathering feedback from the communities they aim to support.

James and David reflect on James's first six months mentoring IDEMS' research methods support team in West Africa. They discuss the challenges and rewards of supporting a team remotely, drawing on James's experiences as a statistician and the wider expertise available within IDEMS. They also explore how mentorship can help strengthen local research capacity and support the team's long-term development and independence.

James and David discuss the challenges and opportunities of working with climate data in South Sudan, ahead of meetings with the country's meteorological service. They explore the availability of historical climate records, their potential to support climate services for farmers, and opportunities for collaboration with local universities to build expertise and make better use of climate data.

Following their discussion on data interoperability and distributed ownership, George and David explore Anthropic's new version control system and how it relates to IDEMS' own technological innovations. They discuss how advances in AI-driven software development are challenging established approaches to version control, and why Anthropic's work provides encouraging validation of ideas that IDEMS has been developing. They also explain how IDEMS aims to build on similar principles to support collaboration across systems with genuinely distributed ownership.