Local Data Economies: Gender, Jobs and Climate Equity
Summary
In 2024, OK Kit committed to support the localization of data collection in Karangasem, the poorest regency with the highest social, disaster, infrastructure, and economic risks in Bali. By localizing the collection of data for international NGOs, United Nations organizations, and others, OK Kit will support the creation of local data economies and enable local communities to better steward their economic, social, and climate prosperity. Programs to address poverty, gender equity, data collection and mapping trainings, and carbon offset tracking efforts, and other sustainable and economic development indicators can be localized and monitored immediately and effectively. Free mapping tools with local training reduce data and research costs and climate footprints by at least 50% and increase local wages 100-900%. Local women will be trained with 17 free and open-source data collection, mapping, analysis, and monitoring tools to enable locally led prioritization, coordination, and monitoring across the SDGs and stakeholders.
Approach
OK Kit commits to support the localization of data collection in Karangasem, the poorest regency with the highest social, disaster, infrastructure and economic risks in Bali, Indonesia. By localizing the collection of data for international NGOs, United Nations organizations, and others, OK Kit will support the creation of local data economies and enable local communities to better steward their economic, social, and climate prosperity. International non-profit organizations often contract externally to collect data related to poverty, gender, carbon offset efforts, and other sustainable and economic development indicators , but with the expansion of free mapping tools, coupled with localized training, OK Kit will reduce data and research costs, along with the climate footprint of data collection by at least 50%. By providing internationally standardized wages, OK Kit will also increase local wages 100-900% compared to country standards.
OK Kit empowers women and girls to thrive in safe spaces to produce outputs of higher standards and quality than military and international NGOs, to ensure women’s unique public and private sector infrastructure and service needs are prioritized, and a rapid transition to a viable economic model exists to support the central role of women to contribute their knowledge toward their economic, social and climate prosperity. Local women will be trained with 17 free and open-source data collection, mapping, analysis, and monitoring tools to enable locally-led prioritization, coordination, and monitoring across the SDGs and stakeholders. This low-cost method enables continuous and consistent monitoring to meet the urgency of multiple accelerating risks, and reduces long grant processes.
By employing community members locally, geospatial indicators, which are currently missing from the SDGs, will be collected and used to assess mobility, safety and security; support better governance and accountability to depoliticize infrastructure and investments; and prioritize essential household and business infrastructure and services for women and local communities.
Action Plan
The program produces economic, social and climate impacts within the first month of implementation, with reports produced every three months, throughout the 12 months of implementation. After this intensive first three month period, further adjustments, enhancements and community consultation, and training cycles are completed monthly, with quarterly events in March, June, September and December to share progress and complete the defined catchment area data across the SDGs. Continuous awareness campaigns recruit and retain program support across sectors.
Month 1: Remote community planning, identify progressive cross sector partners, typically convening a minimum of 25 organizations across government, business, non-profit, schools and universities, and local community leaders. Collect available cross sector gender and SDG data layers across local, regional and international partners. Recruit and train local trainers, plan gender data and social programs cycles.
Month 2: In-person cross-sector community consultations identify priorities, risks (privacy/security) and opportunities against the collected SDG map layers and inform the 1-2 week workshop mapping tasks.
Month 3: Host sales event to increase local and international revenues and trade partnerships. Showcase data, community, revenue and climate impacts. Prepare outputs and campaigns for key local, regional and national and international funder meetings.
The deliverables include an SDG map layering of available public and private sector datasets for discussion and verification at cross-sector community consultations. Community feedback on priorities, risks and opportunities develop the training content and mapping tasks. Mapping tasks are trained in minutes to hours, to workshop sprints of 2-5 days each for selected tools to cross-sector people.
Gender gap mapping produces comprehensive quantitative and qualitative surveys on mobility against household, health, livelihood, education tasks, GBV and well-being. An intimate partner violence, gender bias and HIV transmission reduction program and stress and trauma management program will be designed.
Background
Slow, bureaucratic, expensive grant and fundraising models allocate less than 10% of budgets to local civil society organizations, based on 2023 OECD data. Expatriate staff and external contractors cycle in and out of local communities to implement siloed UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) initiatives that leave communities with no alternative but to attend numerous meetings and workshops for short-term efforts with progressively fewer and smaller budgets. These funding systems create the conditions for politics, competition, and corruption to already traumatized communities dealing with increasing climate change and pandemic risks, versus an environment of innovation, collaboration, and coordination. Additionally, construction and engineering industries that use mapping often face corruption challenges.
With the high cost and climate footprint of data and technical production largely awarded to Western and external contractors, most initiatives continue to cite the lack of data and the lack of local capacity as key challenges. Many policies are developed without representative and statistically significant data that reflect complex local contexts, especially from women, youth, marginalized, and informal communities. 75 years after the UN declared gender equality a human right, 78% of the SDG’s 231 indicators do not contain gender data. Despite women’s majority contributions for household and livelihood tasks, they have the least access to essential household and business infrastructure. The lack of good jobs with livable wages separate families and force migration to congested cities, increasing conflict, gender-based violence, labor, and resource exploitation risks. With increasing disaster and climate change threats, massive data and mitigation gaps remain despite the Sendai Framework established in 2015. 78% of the last 30 years of climate research funding were funded to Western organizations.
Progress Update
Partnership Opportunities
Financial stability will ensure the successful, comprehensive implementation of the program at scale to showcase how local data economies and inclusive policy, program and funding development implementation can rapidly address urgent gender, jobs, conflict and climate gaps. Ok Kit is committed to creating safe spaces for local communities to thrive, and welcomes local knowledge and expertise to inform and support the program., The process is fully open-sourced to encourage local implementation. OK Kit is currently working to secure the institutionalization of local data economies into World Bank’s methodology to enable global communities to access World Bank Technical Assistance funding to support the establishment of local data economies and accelerated MSME regeneration.