Experience: Data Management for delivering COVID-19 relief in Panama

A data-driven public sector recognizes data as a key element for implementing policies based on evidence. The open data movement has been a major catalyst for elevating data to a privileged position in many governments around the globe. In Panama, open data has enabled the improvement of data management in each institution. However, it is required to go further to create an integrated data-driven government with a common objective. Public institutions collect a huge amount of data that may never be used, and some others do not contain enough quality to provide trustworthy results. The state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 showed the necessity of establishing a common digital government vision for planning, delivering, and monitoring public services, as well as strengthening the technical foundation in the public sector to improve data value cycle: acquisition, storage, and exploitation. This paper reports from a data custodian perspective how the state of emergency worked as a catalyst to boost government data management, specifically for the Vale Digital program, a social relief linked to the identity card implemented by the Panamanian government during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may possibly be the greatest government data integration to date in terms of impact, data volume, rapid implementation, and institutions involved.