Gender

Approved Scaling: $455M Mindanao Transport Connectivity Improvement Project

In 2019, I led my largest implementation and field testing of my local data economy model. Research, investment, policy and program development studies are typically conducted in a siloed and uncoordinated fashion that requires a lot of time, effort and expense for local communities. The Philippines is ranked as the most at risk for disasters and climate change, averaging 22 typhoons (hurricanes or cyclones) a year. This places a tremendous burden on local communities who are typically required to travel long, difficult journeys to attend numerous events and workshops that are often located far away near airports or luxury hotels for the convenience of donors and funders.

In 2019, with World Bank, IFC and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade funding, I was able to conduct five simultaneous studies, including World Bank’s first gender gap mapping study, across six provinces in the conflict region of Mindanao in the Philippines as Technical Assistance for the Mindanao Transport Connectivity Improvement Project:

1. 600 Gender Gap Mapping Household Surveys
2. 7000 Agriculture Commodity Flow and Origin-Destination Surveys
3. Six Province AI Studies on Industrial Logistics Congestion and Challenges
4. 3 Regional Open Workshops for 180 Cross-Sector Participants (including micro enterprise through to conglomerates)
5. Road, Agriculture, Micro to Medium Enterprise (MSME) to Industrial, Indigenous, Tourism and Creative Industries and Disaster Infrastructure Field and Remote Mapping

These studies required 200 field staff, all of whom were Filipino, and 180 were located in close proximity to the survey sites. For the community-based mapping workshops, I undertook a careful validation process of ensuring the community was represented by progressive cross-sector leaders across government, business, non-profit, schools and university staff and students, and local community leaders. Rather than requiring a technical background, an interest to learn and teach others was the primary criteria, because the best knowledge often comes from people with strong community ties and diverse experiences. Our simplified mapping techniques ensure that anyone can learn to map, and we’ve trained people from age 6-60+ years.

Through our exclusive use of free and open source software and frugal sciencem methods, and hiring local staff and data collectors and processors, we not only strengthen local community engagement, but we are able to increase and improve the standard of data and outputs, at a much lower costs and environmental footprint. This enabled on average, and increase of 2-5 times higher staff and data wages. With every expense designed to directly benefit the local community sites, we create opportunities for research, investment, policy and program development studies, across public and private sectors to be transformed into accelerated impact models.

We were fortunate to compelete the program and report approvals in March 2020. This project enabled and challenged me to further develop inclusive innovations, frugal science, and safer methods that achieve representative data samples at scale, while supporting our highest wages to date, which is US$100 per hour for fully remote recruitment and data collection during the pandemic.

Following the approved expansion of the program in November 2025, the World Bank announced a $455 million fund to support the expansion of the Mindanao Transport Connectivity Improvement Project.

Local Data Economies: Gender, Jobs, Food and Climate Equity

OpenForum Europe (OFE) recently invited me Boston to present my local data economy in partnership with Harvard’s new Digital Data Design Institute. OFE is a European open source software think tank that advises European policymakers and legislators on the merits of openness in computing and provides technical analysis and explanation. OFE promotes open source software, as well as openness more generally, as part of a vision to facilitate open, competitive choice for technology users.

FOSS local data economies are self-sustaining and more equitable economic, social and environmental models that meet the pace and urgency of accelerating global risks. Faster, more accurate, verifiable and representative data enable better public and private sector prioritization, coordination and monitoring across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs largely lack geospatial indicators that capture mobility, safety, proximity, infrastructure and service assessments, which accurately reflect the intersecting risks and opportunities communities experience in real-life. 78% of the 231 SDG indicators lack gender data, and despite women’s majority contributions to household and economic tasks, they have the least access to essential household and business infrastructure.

OECD reports that less than 10% of funding is received by local organizations, with 80% of climate research awarded to Western organizations over the last 30 years. Of the $137 billion invested a decade after Super Typhoon Haiyan and the Sendai Framework, only 4 percent was invested in mitigation in Asia Pacific, and the lack of coordination and tangle of overlapping multilateral efforts continues to create further chaos to already traumatized communities. 

Rather than a siloed and political approach reliant on glacial grant and funding processes, local governments and cross-sector communities co-develop their own continuous and interoperable SDG map with geospatial indicators to better fast track public and private sector investments and interventions, receive the majority of budgets, and address long neglected infrastructure and the unique needs of marginalized communities.

With the exclusive use of free and open source mapping tools including unique digital twin techniques for infrastructure and disaster modelling, non-technical and technical local communities produce faster, more accurate, representative and verifiable data, at 50% lower cost and environmental footprints, while increasing local daily wages 100-900 percent, starting at 3 months. The highest wage to date is remotely trained World Bank road safety surveys at $100 per hour of work.

This an immediately viable transition to a local data economy, where local communities continuously lead data and knowledge on their community, industry and geography, to depoliticize investments, with greater governance and accountability, especially in technology, engineering and construction, which are among the most corrupt industries.

This bridges the gaps between effective policy, program development, local capacity, data and research gaps.

Download the paper here.

Publication: Open Mapping Toward Sustainable Development Goals

Thrilled to be invited by the Youthmapper family to write a chapter on my gender, jobs and climate program for Springer’s Sustainable Development Goal Series. Open Mapping towards Sustainable Development Goals

• Offers the voices of students or recent graduates in countries where YouthMappers is active
• Covers topics ranging from water, agriculture, food, to waste, education, gender, and disasters
• Addresses topics at various scales of perspective, from individual/local city level to national and global scopes
• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access

Read my chapter Sustainable Development in Asia Pacific and the Role of Mapping for Women. and download the whole ebook.

CGIAR Indonesia-Africa SDG Workshop

In September 2022, CGIAR funded our Open Knowledge Kit accelerated humanitarian and MSME regeneration program in Bali, Indonesia. We brought together selected technical and non-technical women and Indigenous youth to learn our accelerated program of SDG data collection, mapping, analytics and monitoring, drone operations, and Tourism and Creative Industries micro, small and medium enterprise support and market access.

Our model delivers faster, more accurate verifiable representative data using free and open source tools and low-cost equipment. Training local communities means expensive consultant, equipment, software and travel costs and carbon footprints are greatly reduced, and enable continuous and consistent monitoring while increasing local daily wages by 100 to 1700 percent.

CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future dedicated to transforming food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis. The Open Knowledge Kit program is supported under their gender and digital divide Digital Innovation Initiative.

Read CGIAR’s blog post.

Open Knowledge Kit: 2023 Launch

Open Knowledge Kit is a global program that addresses long-standing barriers to addressing gender, jobs and climate security gaps. Non-technical and technical cross-sector local communities led by women are rapidly trained across 15 free and open source tools to create local data employment opportunities at 2-17 times higher daily wages, while agriculture, tourism and creative industries are connected to premium and ethical clients.

We’re committed to the long-term well-being of local communities by coordinating donors across multi-year investments and enabling them to make more informed decisions with better data, prioritization and monitoring methods across the Sustainable Development Goals.

Stay tuned for our official launch soon!

Pacific Forum Women Peace and Security Fellow

This November, I became a Women, Peace and Security Fellow for the Pacific Forum. The Pacific Forum enables academics and professionals to conduct research and support WPS programming in fields such as inclusive health security, cybersecurity, climate security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, preventing and countering violent extremism, and maritime security, with a focus on the promotion of women’s participation in peace and security policy at international levels in dialogues, policies, and peace processes. Founded in 1975, the Pacific Forum is a non-profit, foreign policy research institute based in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Forum’s programs encompass current and emerging political, security, economic and business issues and works to help stimulate cooperative policies in the Indo-Pacific region through analysis and dialogue undertaken with the region’s leaders in the academic, government, and corporate areas.

I’m currently designing a gender and climate security study using geospatial indicators and 3D reconstruction across eight countries, including comparisons on conflict and infrastructure.

Understanding Risk Asia

We were invited to present at two sessions at the 2021 Understanding Risk Asia conference hosted by World Bank and National University of Singapore.

I led a solo session talking about our Open Knowledge Kit program and four career tracks and also curated the panel presenting the developers behind our technology and implementing partners.

Open Knowledge Kit (OK Kit) is a free and open-source tool kit to empower local communities with digital employment through geospatial data collection, analytics and monitoring toward the stewardship of their economic, climate, and social prosperity. Surveys, disaster and climate change modeling and 3D reconstruction are now possible at much lower costs, training local and non-technical communities.

OK Kit Addresses the key barriers to achieving the SDGs:

1. Short-term and uncoordinated donor projects led by community outsiders 
2. Expensive, proprietary and closed technology systems
3. The gender gap
4. Decent Work

FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires

I’ll be speaking at FOSS4G 2021, the world’s largest geospatial conference on free and open source software.

Pandemic and Climate Recovery through FOSS4G Local Knowledge Stewardship and Employment Models

September 30, 14:30–15:00, Puerto Madryn

The Open Knowledge Kit Regeneration Program addresses key challenges in the pandemic and climate crisis: How to collect near real-time data, how to create research, policy and programs that reflect the central role of women in the economic and social prosperity of their communities, how to address the political and funding barriers in hazard and climate change modeling, and how to develop fully local research teams to address revolving door outsider and expat models in vulnerable communities.

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