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Today we're celebrating the first day of spring! But it's not the only reason to celebrate. Perhaps you didn't know that the 21st of March is also the International Day of Forests was established on the 21st day of March, by resolution of The United Nations General Assembly.

Each year, more than 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forests are lost; an area roughly the size of England. As go the forests, so go the plant and animal species that they embrace – 80% of all terrestrial biodiversity. Most importantly, forests play a critical role in climate change including global warming: deforestation results in 12-18 percent of the world's carbon emissions – almost equal to all the CO2 from the global transport sector. 

Together with EcoMatcher we've prepared something special to help the marketing research industry greening the world, tree by tree, survey by survey. 

In the previous blog post, we've introduced 100WEEKS, an inspiring Dutch non-profit organization helping women in Africa to get out of extreme poverty. Since 2015 they have already helped 240 women and are successfully proceeding with next projects. We (Nebu) are supporting this amazing social responsible initiative by providing 100WEEKS with Nebu Dub InterViewer to facilitate the data collection processes. It is great to see how they have been able to use Nebu's tool to the reality of the challenging African environment!

100WEEKS together with the local fieldwork team have set-up a tablet-based Pop-Up call center and are proceeding with the first interviews! The local program manager Fabrice (on the right) together with four interviewers (from left to right: Maureen, Lucie, Benign, Maliza) are calling women regularly to hear how they are doing and to collect data thereon. 

Data collection is an important part of the project as Johannes (in the middle of the picture in the front of Jeroen, 100WEEKS' co-founder) needs to measure the impact of the program on the lives of 100 women taking part in the project.

R has gained massive popularity in the past decade as the tool of choice for a wide variety of data analysts. The language is used as part of the data analysis toolchain in some of the biggest companies in the world. The former Revolution Analytics listed up some of the companies that work with R. That list looked impressive already in 2014 including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Monsanto, the FDA, Lloyds, Credit Suisse. Airbnb joined the club in 2016.  

R first appeared in the 1990s in New Zealand, as an implementation of the S statistical programming language. R was written by statisticians, with statistics and data in mind. It is a perfect choice for data analysis, statistical modeling, simulation and graphics. Even though these are key distinguishing features of R, the language provides some other powerful features we will mention below.

Statistics and data in the DNA

R allows you to manipulate (e.g., subset, recode, merge) data quickly.  Some R packages have been designed specifically for these purposes, e.g., dplyr. Typically, a majority of the time spent on an analysis project is spent on the analysis—preparing the data.  R is much adept and efficient in data preparation. Collected data often requires many steps in data processing to be ready for analysis, so R is ideal.

For more than one billion people currently living in extreme poverty, life is an everyday struggle. Many of them know very well how to escape poverty but lack the opportunity to realize their potential. 100WEEKS provides one hundred weeks of coaching and financial support for women in Africa. Their mission is well captured by their tagline “Temporary Cash for Permanent Change”. 

100WEEKS has inspired Nebu to officially launch its Social Responsibility Program. Nebu is supporting the organization by providing market research tools to measure the impact of their upcoming project in Ghana.