Gender & Equity Dashboard

Project Description

Sitting on the tarmac in Manila I just had one more meeting to swing by in Queensland before flopping into my bed back home in Melbourne. The problem was, the plane had been sitting on the tarmac now for 3hrs. Or so I was told - I hadn't noticed because I'd been mapping out a new idea. Using up all my business class seat, and a little of my neighbours, I'd spread out a collection of Equity related reports I'd taken with me from my last meeting with WHO. Whilst I loved the quality of technical work that had been produced, I felt it could be synthesised and made so much more accessible, interactive and engaging. By the time the plane took off for Australia another 2 hours later, I'd emailed one of WHO's units outlining the idea.

In the weeks that followed, and working closely with Dr Kira Fortune and her team, this idea evolved into what became called the 'Gender & Equity Dashboard'. The idea was to create a central online place for Gender and Equity data and literature relevant to helping the 37 countries and territories of the Western Pacific Region tackle these complex problems with greater ease. The dashboard was designed to help people:

1. Better understand the current state of gendered health inequities through data visualisation and written reports,
2. Provide easy access to practical tools and resources, and
3. Profile good practices and initiatives already undertaken throughout the region

Unfortunately, people in every country experience poor health outcomes because of their gender. Some genders are more vulnerable to noncommunicable diseases whilst others to environmental health impacts. These outcomes also vary by country. For example suicide is most common among men except in China. Similar gender inversions occur in different countries in areas such as tobacco use (where Cooks Islands and Niue show more females affected), multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (where PNG, Northern Mariana Islands and FSM overemphasise females), and HIV infections (where PNG and Cambodia reverse the trend towards females). Understanding the story behind this data is important for each countries approach as well as comparisons they tend to draw between each other.

Gender and Equity health is a hard area to tackle and many groups already do great work at both the international and local level. The idea of this project wasn't to recreate the wheel, but rather make existing work more accessible. We also wanted to profile this work in a format and structure that would would be scalable, sustainable and enjoyable. Easy access to good data, relevant reports and useful tools can inspire and empower leaders to be more effective.

To make this project dovetail geopolitically, the structure of the solution design was aligned with the World Health Organizations 'For the Futures' strategy. This is a document that member states of the Western Pacific Region signed in 2019 setting a cooperative agenda over the following few years. It forms the key health priorities for the region and acts as an overarching focusing document that pulls together how countries will practically work towards achieving global agendas such as the SDG’s, UHC, IHR etc. 

The dashboard is scheduled to launch early 2021.