Dr Saffron Woodcraft secures new funding to commercialise Citizen Prosperity Index Dashboard

A team of researchers and data analysts at the Institute for Global Prosperity led by Dr Saffron Woodcraft has been awarded £30,000 of UCL’s Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Funding to explore the potential for the commercialisation of the Citizen Prosperity Index Global Dashboard. The Index is an innovative data tool that reports on local levels of prosperity, using measures co-designed with citizens to reflect what matters to people in different communities globally.

The Citizen Prosperity Index methodology has already been piloted in the UK, Lebanon and Tanzania to develop prosperity indices which will help to inform policy and decisions within government, NGOs and private sector stakeholders. For example, the London Legacy Development Corporation has adopted the Index to measure the social and economic impacts of Olympic Legacy regeneration investments in east London.

The funding will be used to carry out market research to develop a commercialisation strategy for the Index and to enable further development of the dashboard itself. Access to the data on the Index’s dashboard will bring significant benefits to multiple stakeholders from outside academia who will be able to use the information about the priorities of local communities to shape their decision-making and policies. For example, developers in the private sector will get a much better understanding of what people based in the areas where they are building want and need from changes in their local areas.

Academic lead for the project Dr Saffron Woodcraft said

“"This is an important step forward in scaling the Citizen Prosperity Index approach.  Pilots in the UK, Kenya, Tanzania, and Lebanon have focused on developing context-specific prosperity metrics co-designed with local communities and policy partners, and creating city-level dashboard tools.  This in-depth research has enabled us to design an overarching prosperity framework based on structural equation modelling (SEM).  The early commercialisation funding will enable us to advance this work and develop a global dashboard using secondary data sources, extending the reach of the Citizen Prosperity Index approach to new geographies and respond to international interest in this work."