With a workforce made up of specialists on data analytics, branding, and communications, COPE Nepal uses advanced data science techniques to create reports on the pandemic. These reports have been picked up by various media, including the humanitarian information portal ReliefWeb.
Visualising data, and making it easily understandable to policy-makers and the public enables greater understanding of trends of the pandemic, its demographic breakdown, and allows proper plans to be in place to deal with the health and economic impact of the pandemic.
For instance, COPE’s gender and age breakdown of Nepal’s Covid-19 caseload illustrates with very simple graphics which segment of the population is most impacted – in Nepal the positive cases are mostly among younger people, but fatalities are in an older cohort.
After Harshitaa Agrawal’s plans to attend graduate school were compromised by the pandemic, she co-founded Studio Rever which specialises in art installations, interior design, set designs, and product styling. Agrawal and co-founder Ankita Saigal, based in Mumbai, met while pursuing their undergraduate degrees in the US.
Their plan to open Studio Rever, which had been in the cookbooks for a while, seemed too far-fetched till Covid-19 created a world where they could work together despite being located in different countries. Now, their firm is fully operational and has hired a marketing intern.
Says Agrawal: “Of course, things have been slow because of Covid. But on the upside, it has given us extra time to research and figure out backend logistics, without which our launch wouldn’t have been possible.”