Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority and SAS join hands to help shape the next generation

Abu Dhabi Early Childhood and SAS weave a data story to impact the lives of young children  

“Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA) is a government entity that supports our government partners to help all of Abu Dhabi’s young children flourish. The responsibility of guiding Abu Dhabi into the future rests on the shoulders of the current and future generations of children. We must make sure that the next generation grows up healthy, educated, and contributes as citizens and residents to the city of Abu Dhabi. These young children will take the nation forward in the next fifty years,” - H.E Dr Yousef Al Hammadi, Executive Director, Knowledge & Impact Sector.

In collaboration with SAS, Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA) launched its Abu Dhabi Child Insights System Program, the first of its kind in the Middle East to collect cross sectoral government data for the purpose of creating data-driven insights that introduce better policies leading to positive social impacts in Abu Dhabi.

ECA is a purpose-driven governmental organization that was established to provide children with the right ecosystem to enable them to become valuable members of society responsible for guiding Abu Dhabi into the future. ECA achieves this by promoting collaboration to help all of Abu Dhabi’s young children flourish - from the early stages of pregnancy until the children are eight years old - and does this across four pillars: health and nutrition; child protection; family support; and early education and care.

Cross-sectoral data for actionable insights

ECA has seen several challenges impacting young children, where, for instance, and it is observed that well-being challenges that impact young children in one sector have their root causes hidden in data from other sectors, requiring the need for a cross sectoral 360 degree view on young children. As such, ECA must understand the possible data dimensions across multiple sectors to draw on the necessary insights that will help the social policymakers and government agency partners drive targeted interventions.

This resulted in the establishment of an integrated, cross-sectoral data hub which analyzes data from different sectors like health and nutrition to family support and education. The hub enables ECA to understand the root causes impacting the numerous challenges influencing the physical, emotional, and mental growth of children in Abu Dhabi.

ECA has identified the data that is of interest across sectors based on use cases approved by its leadership. In using the SAS Data Management Platform, ECA has implemented a series of data integration, data transformation, and data quality routines to create trusted cross-sectoral data marts.

The unified data insights platform running on SAS Viya feeds into the child data hub, providing up-to-date insights using machine learning, expert modeling, and explainable AI techniques. The final step in the process sees data visualization being leveraged for the benefit of policymakers.

Child wellbeing can be improved through data-driven interventions. Implementing the SAS Data Management Platform helps ECA analyze data to identify the challenges that children face. By using SAS solutions, ECA has been able to bring together data from multiple government agencies from over 1 000 data attributes of more than 350 000 children all while ensuring the highest level of data privacy.

There is a long journey ahead, and ECA and SAS aim to address more than 20 use cases ranging from childhood obesity, child protection, and more – driving sustainable intervention through data analysis, innovation and collaboration.