A prestigious award

We are very pleased to announce that Scriptoria’s work to produce an advanced data management system for the West African Virus Epidemiology (WAVE) programme has been placed joint second (‘highly commended’) in the ‘Non-Physical Project’ category of the respected 2020 British Expertise International Awards.

Judged by industry leaders and British Expertise International’s patron HRH the Duke of Gloucester, the awards recognise the innovation, talent and commitment of the world’s leading players in the international development sector. Scriptoria joined multi-million-dollar firms such as Mott MacDonald, Cardno Emerging Markets and Turner & Townsend to be recognised for the contribution of our work to key food security initiatives and to the Global Goals.

About the project

Funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the WAVE programme works to track the spread of diseases affecting key crops in ten countries across West and Central Africa. To help them with this work, the multi-dimensional cloud-based data cube that Scriptoria has created brings together field and laboratory data from major plant virus surveys run by WAVE – making it much easier for their researchers to access and analyse their data.

WAVE scientists are now using this tool to rapidly explore their programme data and answer a range of questions that could not be addressed when the data was held in separate repositories. As part of a new FCDO and BMGF funded programme – Africa Crop Epidemiology System (ACES) – the system is now also being expanded to join with other data repositories to create an Africa-wide plant health system.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the awards (usually held in central London) took place online this year. Full details can be found in the awards programme here. Despite the change in format the ceremony was very well run, and we’d like to thank British Expertise International for the extra effort that went into hosting the event safely.

If you’d like to know more about Scriptoria’s data services, contact data@scriptoria.co.uk.