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Welcome to the Magic Box wiki!

UNICEF's Office of Innovation is developing software intended to use real-time data to inform life-saving humanitarian responses to emergency situations. This open-source platform ingests data from both public sources and from private sector partners, and generates insights based on methodologies and algorithms provided by our data science team. Magic Box was first trialed during the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa. A second version was developed with Google in response to the Zika outbreak in 2015. Applications of this platform include epidemics, response to natural disasters, estimation of indicators such as youth unemployment, literacy index, and others.

Magic Box serves various kinds of data aggregated by administrative boundaries.

Currently available:

• Population
• Mosquito prevalence
• Epi case data

With these data sources you can create things like:

• You can fetch data from the public API here
• Read an article about it.
• Install the API locally. (It comes with test data, but you can continue with the instructions below to get most of the same data we use.)

Get the tools we use to download and aggregate the data

• Download shapefiles from gadm.org

• Import shapefiles to postgres

• Latitude longitude coordinates to admin ID server

• Aggregate worldpop.org.uk population by admin

• Aggregate mosquito prevalence admin

• Download Zika case data from Paho and aggregate by ISO week