Success story of data literacy training program: ROEUN Narith

Many of the data transparency training participants have been using data in one way or another in their day-to-day work. They sign-up for the program to improve their ability to use data as a means of storytelling to a new level. Roeun Narith is the perfect example of this type of participant. Narith graduated with a Master’s of Commerce (Agriculture) degree from Lincoln University, New Zealand, in 2018. After his graduation, Narith spent half a year as a trade coordinator at an international organization before his current position as a research associate (Economics) at Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI).

Before the program, Narith had experience with using statistical software to analyze data. He has used several analytical programs including Stata and SPSS, but his skills were not at an advanced level. He used programs mainly for creating some simple tables and basic graphs to attach to reports. Before the training, Narith was most used to mining, cleaning, and arranging data in an unsystematic way.  “Data is the most frequent daily word at my workplace,” Narith says, and he saw this training as an opportunity to gain advanced data skills, a priority for staff capacity-building at CDRI.   

Narith Roeun was informed about the training program by a friend, and he quickly found that it was relevant to his needs for upgrading his skills to fill the gaps.

“The advantage I gained from the training is the skills and confidence on data cleaning and visualizations I need to use for my job as a researcher. I sometimes use Datawrapper and Flourish for interactive presentations for the team.”

What Narith Roeun found most compelling about the training was the gains he saw in his efficiency when using data to tell stories and address policy matters at work. Narith was able to get his work done in minutes while the same tasks previously took hours with poorer results. He also found that his work quality increased now that he had new ways of verifying his findings.

Narith Roeun is interested in issues relating to agricultural trade, particularly focusing on smallholder farmers. His outputs are not just showing data, but presenting information that is well-grounded. This means having good data and presenting data in the most appropriate styles and formats. Narith is required to do more than just showing data to convince policymakers or scholars.

During the program, Narith worked to analyze how cassava has become an important ingredient in a wide range of processed goods, ranging from human and animal food to consumer and industrial products sold across the world. In 2017, the total harvested area was 26,636,706 thousand ha, producing fresh cassava of 296,855,459 tonnes. Cambodia was the third-largest exporter of cassava starches, making up 1.4 percent of world cassava exports after Vietnam (the second at 35.7 percent) and Thailand (the first at 59.8 percent). It is a notable point that the biggest exporters are all neighboring countries in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.​ Read more on his blog: Cassava industry in Cambodia.

Narith found it beneficial to attend the training because while he already had some basic skills in data, it helped him to learn new tools. He found that this training was helpful because with the knowledge he gained he feels more capable of doing self-learning in an effective and rigorous manner. Narith has since begun applying the skills he learned in the training to learn how to use RStudio open-source software to tell more complex data-driven policy narratives. Without the training, Narith says he may have been working in an out-of-date data style.

After the training, Narith Roeun started using Tabula to scrape data from PDFs and convert it into standardized data to create quick visualizations in Flourish or Datawrapper. Without these tools, there was no way to avoid having to input data in a very time-consuming manner. 

Narith has used his data analysis to work to promote new smallholder farmers. He says that one recommendation to policymakers is to promote smallholders through 4Ps (Public-Private-Producer Partnerships), promoting horizontal and vertical coordination. To do this, he says there needs to be a nationwide project that tracks and assesses real-time data so that smallholder farmers can get the best prices in a global trade network. His current study is attempting to create a model for this to take place.

In his role with the Centre for Development Economics and Trade (CDET), Narith leads a project that aimed to investigate the agricultural value chain of two selected products exported from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam to China. The hope was to explore, among other things, key actors, their interactions, benefits, value-added and challenges. The project also plans to map out non-tariff measures introduced by Mekong-Lancang countries, compare them across those countries and examine export firms’ perspectives regarding their effect on exports to China.

Enjoy the video highlight on Data Literacy Training: Phase 2. The program consists of 3 training phase and a final workshop. Each phase is a 5-day workshop that will progressively equip participants with skills and knowledge on data literacy and data-driven storytelling.