Often in development, we look to national policies and comparisons between them to find examples of effective policy, whether this is in economic growth, job creation, or public service delivery. However, this focus on national comparisons limits our perspective to one scale of analysis. Within most countries, there is both more than one level of governance, and therefore policy and public investment, but there are also uneven initial endowments and resources, levels of private investment and capital flows, and other unique factors of place. Exploring these differences at various geographic scales can shed light on why development policy can be more effective in one region than another. For reasons of comparability, cost-effectiveness, and the mandates of data collectors, this spatially disaggregated data is often not available from one country to the next, and often not comparable.

The open-source database Space2Stats provides the foundation for these consistent, global analytics. We will introduce the database, explore its use cases, and describe how we are pushing the envelope in Cloud Native Geospatial (CNG) solutions to make the data accessible to technical and non-technical users.