T_Jacopo-Ottaviani_49_Connecting-the-Dots-Investigating-in-Data-Scarce-Contexts-Data-Scarcity-and-how-to-overcome-it-Tipsheet.xlsx

	A	B	C	D	E	F
1	Project	Link	What data scarcity problem does this project touch on?	How did team overcome data scarcity?	Key tools	Media organisation

2	Map Makoko	https://pulitzercenter.org/projects/mapping-makoko	The Makoko informal settelment in Lagos, Nigeria, home to 300k people living in dire conditions, was not mapped. A blank spot on the map.	Building community trust, training locals on open data collection and drone mapping, using drones and open data kit to collect the data, which then was uploaded on OpenStreetMap and powered a data journalism campaign	HOTOSM Tasking Manager https://tasks.hotosm.org/ and Open Data Kit https://getodk.org/	Code for Africa
3	Migrants Files	http://themigrantsfiles.com/	Data on migration in Europe was super fragmented, with many little fragmented datasets scattered all over the continent.	Team of European data journalists collected, verified and merged multiple datasets to give the big picture on the tragedy of deaths of migrants. Deduplication of data points was essential.	Carto, gDrive	JournailsmFund.eu
4	Food prices after retail profit margins were capped	https://www.bbc.com/serbian/lat/extra/3169130bhp/cene-namirnica-marze	Prices of basic food items in Serbia have been rising for a long time and have not kept pace with the growth of wages and pensions. People notice this when they go shopping, but there is no single place where they can track these prices or see how much they have changed. The government introduced a regulation capping retail profit margins and announced lower prices, yet there is still no way for citizens to clearly see what has changed and by how much.	There is a website that collects daily price data for all products from the country’s largest supermarket chains. We scraped data from that website both before and after the introduction of the margin limits and analyzed how prices changed for 125 products over six weeks. Instead of focusing on specific brands or stores, we aimed to reflect the real market situation by calculating average prices. For example, the average price of 500 grams of white rice across all available stores and brands. This approach allowed us to overcome the challenge of limited or fragmented official data.	Python, Shorthand	BBC News Serbian
5	Femicide in Serbia: Crime and Lesser Punishments	https://www.cins.rs/en/femicide-in-serbia-crime-and-lesser-punishments/	Since femicide is not defined as a separate criminal offense in Serbia, it is difficult to determine how perpetrators are treated in court, as there are no official statistics on this issue. Only the number of femicide cases is known, and even that data is incomplete, as it comes from the media and is collected by civil society organizations.	Through conversations with experts, we identified three criminal offenses related to murder under which perpetrators of femicide are prosecuted. We then filed FOIA requests to obtain all court cases for those offenses, reviewed them, and selected the ones that involved femicide. Based on that, we created an internal database.	FOIA, Excel, Open Refine	Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia – CINS
6	Waiting for Justice: A System That Has Failed Women	https://www.cins.rs/stories/waiting-for-justice-a-system-that-has-failed-women/	Obstetric violence in Serbia has been a long-standing issue, but information about it mostly comes from individual cases and personal stories. There are no official statistics on the problem. Hospitals do not systematically monitor or report such incidents, and many women choose not to file complaints - often out of fear, exhaustion, or a belief that nothing will change - so these cases rarely leave a written record.	We collected data from several sources: - Through FOIA requests, we asked for all court or prosecution cases related to several criminal offenses we identified together with experts. Since obstetric violence is not a separate criminal offense, women who decide to report it usually do so under charges such as medical error or negligence. - We also filed FOIA requests for all inspection reports from maternity wards and selected those that involved the death of a baby or poor treatment during childbirth - anything that could indicate potential obstetric violence. - Because most cases are never formally reported, we created a questionnaire inviting women to anonymously share their experiences in hospitals. We received over 1,200 responses, which made the patterns we identified highly relevant. We also conducted follow-up interviews with some of the respondents.	FOIA, Excel, Open Refine	Center for Investigative Journalism of Serbia – CINS
7	Capital Expands Along Egypt’s Shores	https://arij.net/investigations/beach-privatization-Egypt/	Investment in Egypt’s northwestern coastal region continues to expand, even as public beach areas steadily shrink. Tourism activities—and their environmental impacts—are also on the rise amid accelerating coastal erosion. Egypt’s coastlines have become a prime destination for investors, particularly from the GCC area. Meanwhile, more stretches of Alexandria’s shoreline have been absorbed into tourism projects, restricting public access and reserving them for those able to pay entry fees or service charges. There is insufficient data on coastal investments—their direct waterfront footprints or the expansion of such holdings over the past decade. The available information is scattered and fragmented across multiple sources.		Google Earth Pro, Spreadsheet, Web data collection	Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ)
8	When Children are Kept out of the Classroom in the Name of the Law	https://arij.net/investigations/syrian-palestinians-egypt-en/?tztc=1	Children of Palestinian refugee families holding Syrian travel documents in Egypt are deprived of access to formal education. No information is available on this group of children. We contacted UNRWA, which confirmed that they have no data on them. We also reached out to research centers specializing in Palestinian refugee affairs but found no available information on Palestinians holding Syrian travel documents in Egypt. So we did our own Survey research		Survey research, Spreadsheet	Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ)
9	The vehicle tracking system is failing to control wasteful government spending on fuel.	https://arij.net/investigations/vehicle-tracking/en/			Data provided by Jordan Car Tracking System and the data were cross-checked against the data collected from fieldwork and on-the-ground observation	Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ)
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100