Buenos Aires / Washington D.C. — June 2026.- Media Party, in partnership with the World Bank Group, today announced the winners of the Data 360 Challenge — a global open innovation competition calling on developers, newsrooms, and civic technologists to build tools that harness World Bank Data360 to advance information integrity, fact-checking, and data-driven journalism.
More than 30 projects from across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and beyond competed in two phases of evaluation. A distinguished international jury scored submissions across six dimensions: Innovation, Data360 Integration, Impact, Applicability, Robustness, and Scalability — producing rigorous peer evaluations.
🥇 Winner — Grand Prize: Chequeado (Argentina)
Datilia — A Consensus Pick for Newsrooms
Live prototype: datilia.chequeado.com
The winner will receive $5,000 USD in funding to continue the development of their prototype, plus visibility within the Media Party network of donors and investors, and opportunities to present at events in Barcelona and Buenos Aires.
Chequeado, Argentina’s leading fact-checking organization, earned the top honor with Datilia — a tool that takes statistical claims in natural language, cross-references them against World Bank Data360, and automatically generates verified, embeddable data visualizations through Datawrapper.
What distinguished Datilia was not only its technical execution but the breadth and depth of consensus among all six jury members — a rare feat in a competitive field.
Jurors praised the tool’s strong technical execution and its immediate relevance for newsrooms. They highlighted the value of using natural language processing to cross-reference statistical claims with verified data. While the project’s Spanish-language focus was lauded as a significant strength, jury members suggested that future development could enhance impact by increasing accessibility for lower-resource languages and expanding functionality to perform real-time verification during speeches or press conferences.
🌟 Special Mention: Unequal Scenes / Unequal World
Aerial Visual Storytelling at Global Scale
Live prototype: https://unequal-world-data360.pages.dev
Unequal Scenes — known internationally for its award-winning aerial photography documenting inequality — submitted one of the highest-scoring projects, earning a Special Mention for its visual creativity and exemplary use of World Bank data.
The project pairs striking real-world imagery with interactive, embeddable World Bank Data360 indicators, allowing readers and newsrooms to explore inequality through both emotional and evidence-based lenses.
The jury commended the project for its impressive visual creativity and effective integration of interactive data indicators. Feedback emphasized the thoughtful and assistive use of AI, which allows users to explore inequality through both emotional and evidence-based lenses. Jurors noted the project’s high potential for storytelling and suggested that its solid scientific framework and usability make it a standout, deployable solution.
🥉 Second special mention: Abrimos.info (Latam)
AI-Powered Data Journalism Templates from World Bank Data
Live prototype: https://data360-demo.abrimos.info/
Abrimos.info earned a special mention with a tool that automatically generates data journalism articles and analysis from World Bank Data360 indicators — combining trend detection, automatic change identification, and procurement data analysis to help newsrooms surface newsworthy patterns at scale.
Feedback for this project focused on the strength of its technical and security design, particularly the automated change detection feature, which jurors noted is highly useful for surfacing newsworthy trends. To increase the tool’s utility, jury members recommended enabling the generation of templates from archived articles and integrating additional data sets to allow for the validation and complementation of stories.
About the Jury
The jury for the Data 360 Global Challenge comprises an international panel of experts in journalism, technology, and open data, leveraging deep experience in information integrity and digital ecosystem development.
The panel includes Brittany Kollar, Director of Fact-Checking Initiatives (and Deputy Director of MediaWise) at the Poynter Institute; Lisa Gutermuth, Senior Policy Counsel (and Senior Program Officer for AI and Democracy) at the Mozilla Foundation; Mersedesh Tariverdi, Data Specialist at the World Bank Group’s Development Data Group; Irene Jay Liu, Senior Expert in Information Integrity (and Director of AI, Emerging Tech & Regulation) at the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM); Sasa Vucinic, Founder and Managing Partner at North Base Media; and Mariano Blejman, Founder of Media Party.
This group brings together leadership from prominent institutions dedicated to safeguarding information ecosystems, ensuring that the selected innovation projects meet high standards of technical maturity, market viability, and public good impact.
About the Data 360 Challenge
The Data 360 Challenge is a joint initiative between Media Party and the World Bank Group designed to unlock the civic and journalistic potential of World Bank Data360 — one of the world’s most comprehensive open databases of development indicators.
The challenge invited technologists, newsrooms, and data journalists to build tools that integrate Data360 to advance information integrity: from fact-checking statistical claims, to exposing inequality through visualization, to making climate data accessible to underserved communities.
The Data 360 Challenge demonstrates what happens when open data meets journalistic creativity and technical ambition. We are proud to have supported this process alongside Media Party, and we congratulate all the teams for their extraordinary work.” Craig Hammer, World Bank Group
Once again, the Media Party community proved that the most innovative tools for journalism are built not in Silicon Valley, but by developers, media organizations, and civil society working together. Chequeado’s Datilia is a perfect example of that — a tool born from real newsroom needs that can now scale globally.” — Mariano Blejman, Founder, Media Party
