Episode 54
Feminising Data and Nudging Change for Gender Equity
In this episode we are celebrating International Women’s Day (IWD). This year’s theme is #EmbraceEquity and aims to get the world talking about why "equal opportunities are no longer enough" - and can in fact be exclusionary, rather than inclusive.
We will be discussing the differences between the terms equity and equality and why is it important to understand, acknowledge and value this.
Definitions of these terms are provided by IWD campaign, they highlight the differences.
• Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities.
• Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
To explore what this means in reality, we have two guests who will speak about the work they are doing to promote equity. They unearth differences as well as similarities across their respective contexts, but draw the same conclusions,
“... it's a process. It takes time. You do get some gains and you should celebrate those. So don't feel frustrated and its small steps and nudging and knowing who to reach out to. Most importantly, listening to the voice of the community and those that we want to work with, that's the most critical part”.
About our guests:
Dr Lilian Otiso - Executive Director, LVCT Health
Dr. Lilian Otiso is the Executive Director of LVCT Health, a large Kenyan NGO that carries out programs on HIV, sexual & reproductive health, gender-based violence, mental health and community health reaching over 1 million individuals annually.
She is a medical doctor with an MBA in Health Care Management currently pursuing a PhD in Global Health at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Her PhD topic is on accountability for universal health coverage among pregnant adolescents/teenage mothers. Lilian has over 15 years’ clinical, programming and research experience in government and NGO sectors at senior management level. She has been a Principle Investigator and co-investigator of several research studies. She is passionate about the community and has conducted several studies and projects on community health. She has contributed to Kenyan and global WHO guidelines and policies and published several documents and peer reviewed articles. She is the winner of the Trocaire Oscar Romero Award 2021 for protecting vulnerable communities during COVID 19.
Dr. Renu Khosla - Director, Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE)
Dr. Kholsa is the Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE). Her core values are designed to include, level-up and connect urban low-income communities. She seeks to unthink and reimagine slum development; nudging a change from top-down to bottom-up and state to people-led development. Her work is aimed at strengthening local government capacity for: participative planning, information visualization and analytics using spatial and social media technologies, localizing and de-engineering solutions and strategies and simplifying institutions. Her work has led to deepening of the policy discourse on urban poor and access to services.
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Transcript
Hello listeners and welcome to the Connecting Citizens to Science Podcast.
Kim Ozano:A podcast where we connect people and communities to science and research so we can join forces to catalyse sustainable global change.
Kim Ozano:In this episode, we are celebrating International Women's Day.
Kim Ozano:We hope you've had a chance to listen to our first International Women's Day episode, it was a cracker, so do tune in for that.
Kim Ozano:This year's theme, as a reminder, is embrace equity, and it calls for the world to move beyond thinking about equality, to thinking about equity.
Kim Ozano:The campaign is stating that equal opportunities are no longer enough and they can in fact be exclusionary rather than inclusive.
Kim Ozano:Today we will be discussing the differences between the term equity and equality and why it is important to understand, acknowledge, and value this.
Kim Ozano:So the definitions of the terms provided by the International Women's Day campaign are that equality gives everyone the same resource.
Kim Ozano:It does not take into consideration that everyone is different, their circumstances are different, and they have different needs.
Kim Ozano:Equity does recognise that fact, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
Kim Ozano:So it's much more about justice and outcome.
Kim Ozano:To explore what this means in reality, we have two guests with us who will be speaking about the work they do to promote equity.
Kim Ozano:We have the honor of having Dr.
Kim Ozano:Renu Khosla, who is the Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence, or CURE.
Kim Ozano:Her work is aimed at unthinking and reimagining slum and inclusive urban development and nudging community-led initiatives that also build resilience.
Kim Ozano:She works to strengthen local capacities for participation, and on a previous International Women's Day, won an award from the government of India for her work in sanitation and promoting equality.
Kim Ozano:We also have the pleasure of Dr.
Kim Ozano:Lillian Otiso, who is the Executive Director at LVCT Health in Kenya.
Kim Ozano:She is a health systems researcher and is involved in several research and community health programmes across several fields to name but a few; HIV, sexual
Kim Ozano:Today, Lillian will be speaking to us about her PhD research with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where she is studying
Kim Ozano:Without further ado, Lillian, welcome to the podcast.
Kim Ozano:Tell us what International Women's Day means for you and what you think about the theme of moving further from equality to equity.
Lilian Otiso:Hi Kim, and thanks for having me.
Lilian Otiso:I'm looking forward to International Women's Day and even having this conversation.
Lilian Otiso:I think International Women's Day is really special for women and it's important to recognise women and the role that we play and how it's like a critical population or group to consider
Lilian Otiso:So it's nice that we have a day to celebrate that and recognise the value of women and focus something important around the issues of women.
Lilian Otiso:I love the theme, the aspects of just embracing equity and going beyond just looking at equality itself.
Lilian Otiso:From my experience, and we've seen this over the years, when you provide equality, it means everything is the same for everyone.
Lilian Otiso:So if it's going to school, you all have the same opportunities, but the reality about where we come from, and I'm speaking to you from Nairobi in Kenya, so African country in a very
Lilian Otiso:When resources have to be shared, the boys get more of those resources.
Lilian Otiso:When we talk about equality and say everybody should go to school, it's said on paper, in practice, it's not.
Lilian Otiso:So the embracing equity here means that now we look at families and accept that their realities are complex.
Lilian Otiso:So how do we help them to meet the needs of the child, the girl child that they've decided maybe not to have allowed to go to school because of resources or something else.
Lilian Otiso:I've seen this a lot in my work, but I, I think I love it, and it's a really exciting theme and quite relevant at this time when we are all looking at this aspect from
Kim Ozano:Thanks very much and I really like that you brought in the girl child versus boy child there, and also what is on paper versus reality.
Kim Ozano:We see a lot of policies and documentation where equality is written into, but in reality the norms in the places where we live have some sort of control of that.
Kim Ozano:So, Renu, welcome to the podcast.
Kim Ozano:Same question to you, tell us what you think of the theme and what International Women's Day means for you.
Renu Khosla:Thanks Kim.
Renu Khosla:What, um, I heard really echoes what happens in India, so I guess this is the common story for women.
Renu Khosla:I think what Women's Day does is that it nudges us to think about women.
Renu Khosla:We think development, we think communities, but we often forget the realities of the way women are, uh, socialised into, um, into believing they don't have agency.
Renu Khosla:That they are disempowered.
Renu Khosla:We don't listen to the complexities and, you know, we had this very interesting study recently that we did with the Institute of Development Studies in India, we were looking
Renu Khosla:It was an eye opener for an organisation like us that's been working for 20 years in slums of different cities in India.
Renu Khosla:We found that women had embodied this whole idea of shame and the male gaze prevented them from even going to the toilet.
Renu Khosla:They want to avoid being seen.
Renu Khosla:They could not purchase a sanitary pad, unless it was the man who helped them go out and buy the sanitary pads.
Renu Khosla:I think that was very, very startling for us and I think that's when we realised that there is an intersectionality to the development, the city development, and the processes of development
Renu Khosla:That's when we felt that our work needs to combine the two together and to nuance it, to granularise it, and to then look at solutions from the perspective of a woman.
Renu Khosla:And that's what women, uh, Women's Day means to us.
Kim Ozano:Solutions from a women's perspective.
Kim Ozano:I think that's exactly what we're looking at today.
Kim Ozano:I also noticed that you used the word nudge quite a lot.
Kim Ozano:Uh, the word nudge, what does that mean for you here?
Renu Khosla:With experience, we began to realise that we cannot make wholesale changes and we need to incrementally make change happen, and therefore we believe that we can nudge
Renu Khosla:That's why nudge is the word that I like to use because I know that working with governments, with city governments, local governments, it is very hard to change the
Renu Khosla:That's nudge.
Kim Ozano:Thank you very much for that.
Kim Ozano:Lillian, I suspect this aligns with your thinking as well.
Kim Ozano:Do you want to tell us a bit about your work and some of the similarities?
Lilian Otiso:Yeah, and, and thanks Renu for bringing in nudge.
Lilian Otiso:I think it's a good point for us to think about.
Lilian Otiso:The truth is policy change and any major changes are slow and sometimes painful and it's incremental changes, not just overnight.
Lilian Otiso:In terms of our work, the organisation I work for, LVCT Health, has been doing a lot of work on HIV GBV sexual reproductive health across the country.
Lilian Otiso:We've always focused on vulnerable and marginalised groups, including, and especially, adolescent girls and young women.
Lilian Otiso:We've seen that in terms of what we do, is we go find them within the communities, come up with programmes where we are working with the young people or as peers and others
Lilian Otiso:The latest work I'm involved in, um, my PhD is looking at teenage mothers and pregnant adolescents.
Lilian Otiso:The basis of this was, in our earlier work, we found that we have a lot of teenage pregnancies.
Lilian Otiso:Actually, it's a crisis in Kenya at the moment.
Lilian Otiso:Every time we have the national exams, the media goes and covers all these girls who are pregnant doing their exams in their hospital bed when they've given birth and things like that.
Lilian Otiso:And we have been saying the same thing over the last 20 years about how to tackle teenage pregnancy.
Lilian Otiso:And that message has been consistent in terms of, this is bad behavior, we need to change the behaviour of these girls and tell them to abstain from sex.
Lilian Otiso:That is the only message.
Lilian Otiso:We've said that over all these years, but what are we actually doing about it that is different?
Lilian Otiso:Are we listening to these girls and seeing why they got pregnant and what happens to them after that, after they give birth?
Lilian Otiso:Unfortunately, the reality is very many of them drop out of school and that's becomes the vicious cycle of they'll get the children, they have to take care of
Lilian Otiso:The work right now is to identify, first of all, when they're pregnant, what are the perceptions in the community?
Lilian Otiso:How do they get access to services that are of the right quality and meet the needs of adolescents which are different from the needs of maybe an older woman.
Lilian Otiso:Are they being taken care of in terms of their psychological need, their medical needs?
Lilian Otiso:In the community who's paying for this?
Lilian Otiso:Are they able to access these services?
Lilian Otiso:And then what happens after they deliver?
Lilian Otiso:Are they able to go back to school?
Lilian Otiso:What programmes exist?
Lilian Otiso:What is the community doing about them?
Lilian Otiso:And how are we preventing future pregnancies among these girls?
Lilian Otiso:So in, in that context, and when you look at the whole aspect of International Women's Day, that's where the equity comes in and that the services are not exactly like
Lilian Otiso:How they're abused, how they're beaten and told things like widen your legs, the way you widen them when you got pregnant, you know, things like that.
Lilian Otiso:And it's very crude and all.
Lilian Otiso:So how do we get the message from them, and we've worked with them as co-researchers or people who have gone through teenage pregnancy to actually do the data collection and mobilisation.
Lilian Otiso:Through that they've identified the real needs and they were surprised how finding out this information and how one person's story is the same as somebody else's story.
Lilian Otiso:The goal now is that we're going to work with them to be able to be the ones who speak to the decision makers and then the decision makers can work out solutions that work for them, both
Lilian Otiso:I'm really tired of doing the same thing over and over and I'm sure that's also something that Renu is seeing in India.
Renu Khosla:Absolutely, we do have a lot of teenage pregnancies but they're all married girls.
Renu Khosla:They're all young girls who've been married off before they have attained puberty.
Renu Khosla:Again, going back to the study that I was talking to you, we were really surprised to learn that many of them had learned about how to manage menarche only from their mother-in-law.
Renu Khosla:So it was a proxy indicator for us, to find out that girls were getting married before they had completed their 16 years, or they had started their puberty.
Renu Khosla:Uh, but you know, I was also connecting to what you were saying, um, Lillian, about the access to health services.
Renu Khosla:But you know, our work is around access to, uh, basic services, water and sanitation, and we did another piece of work where we looked at pregnant women.
Renu Khosla:Water collection storage is a responsibility of women and when they are pregnant, one of the advice that comes from the doctors.
Renu Khosla:You being a health, uh, practitioner, you'd be able to tell us, because the advice is to not carry weights.
Renu Khosla:Here these women are carrying these 20 litre buckets and several of them during the day, uh, taking them into these informal home storing water, and that's their responsibility.
Renu Khosla:It is interesting, we were also struggling to understand what women do when they have these little babies and water filling.
Renu Khosla:You need to fill water, so who do you leave your baby with?
Renu Khosla:Do you carry your baby, little baby along with you?
Renu Khosla:And what are the complications that something like this can lead to uh, as you grow older?
Renu Khosla:I'm just curious as to what really would happen to, uh, women who are carrying weights when they're pregnant.
Lilian Otiso:That's a good question.
Lilian Otiso:The issue is that pregnancy itself already gives back ache because you're carrying a weight that is not normal for your body.
Lilian Otiso:So it's already a big strain on the body.
Lilian Otiso:So we do expect that people shouldn't do very hard work, and especially in their third trimesters, as they're about to deliver.
Lilian Otiso:So that's, those are some of the things we need to address.
Lilian Otiso:Very interestingly in our study for the teenage mothers, for when their parents accepted that they were pregnant, especially their mothers, those are some of the tasks they were quick to help
Lilian Otiso:We will do that for you.
Lilian Otiso:They already recognise that is a problem and it's something that I think it's interesting you've brought it up, it's never been thought about; this woman is married, she's the
Lilian Otiso:So there have to be ways and solutions where things like water are available near the home or even within the home, so they don't have to do heavy work and heavy weightlifting.
Lilian Otiso:It becomes a lot worse for those who've had a cesarean section.
Lilian Otiso:They need time to heal, otherwise the wound will tear and just never heal, and the wound will become a chronic issue, may get infected, and they will also have
Renu Khosla:So, so we come from a perspective where we believe that we need to get toilets and taps at home for women.
Renu Khosla:In informal settlements all they are offered is a set of shared services.
Renu Khosla:A lot of this comes from the fact that there is this whole land occupancy issue, which is illegal, because they're occupying, uh, land informally.
Renu Khosla:There are legal restraints to delivering services at home but at CURE, all our solutions are co-created or designed to enable poor families to
Renu Khosla:We feel, build uh, a healthier environment for, uh, for the women who are living over there.
Renu Khosla:One of the more interesting things that we do is we, we've started feminising data.
Renu Khosla:We believe in community data.
Renu Khosla:We believe that community has the wisdom, the knowledge, the wiseness, and can share their information.
Renu Khosla:Which is then used for planning but feminising this data means trying to bring out the gender aspects of, uh, how men and women are accessing services and how there is
Kim Ozano:It sounds like what you're doing is a lot of co-production.
Kim Ozano:So, Lillian, the same question to you.
Kim Ozano:20 years I can almost hear the frustration in your voice of, you know, the same things have been coming out.
Kim Ozano:Is it changing?
Kim Ozano:Is, is now the time really to, uh, kind of raise the agenda?
Kim Ozano:How is the environment changing in terms of receiving a feminised data set for action?
Lilian Otiso:The 20 years, in my view, are getting even worse.
Lilian Otiso:I didn't think that was possible and, we need to have data and yes feminised data and I like that, really disaggregated.
Lilian Otiso:So we have the gender and we have the age and showing the difference.
Lilian Otiso:One thing that we learnt also from one of the projects we're doing called ARISE, is there's no data on informal urban settlements that is separate.
Lilian Otiso:We have Nairobi, which is a big cosmopolitan city, and it has very rich, it has very poor people, but the data that is collected, is all Nairobi.
Lilian Otiso:So if you're finding out about disease and diarrheal diseases, it's Nairobi wide.
Lilian Otiso:It's not gonna tell you that, actually, most of these diseases are happening in these informal settlements.
Lilian Otiso:It gets even worse within the informal settlements where we all assumed that everyone is the same because they're poor and they live in these slums that, uh, their issues are the same.
Lilian Otiso:But we were able to go in and find that actually things are quite different depending on people.
Lilian Otiso:Some people have some purchasing power, others have nothing.
Lilian Otiso:They can't afford anything.
Lilian Otiso:They're really, really poor.
Lilian Otiso:The data has to be disaggregated to that level where you're able to identify this person is, has been left behind.
Lilian Otiso:When we presented that data to community members and community leaders, they were shocked.
Lilian Otiso:There was a village elder who said, "I'm embarrassed that I have lived here for 20 years, and I did not know that this was happening in my community".
Lilian Otiso:We have to really embrace that aspect where the data is generated from the most basic level, and the community helps to generate it, because they know their
Lilian Otiso:It shouldn't just be data that's collected and thrown away or not used.
Lilian Otiso:It has to be used, otherwise it's pointless to collect it and then disaggregated by gender, by age, and by that social economic status to address that.
Lilian Otiso:I feel like that will be a, a system changer, especially if it's led by government and they take it in, then it would work really well.
Kim Ozano:Feminising data to have systems in place for women that are designed by women.
Kim Ozano:It's great.
Kim Ozano:It's really reassuring to hear that that data is being presented back to communities and that kind of raising an awareness of what's happening is that key first step.
Kim Ozano:So, Renu, within this podcast, we're curious about the ways you disseminate information.
Kim Ozano:So perhaps you could talk a bit about how you communicate your findings?
Renu Khosla:We have over the years spacialised the data that we have been generating from slum and low income informal settlements.
Renu Khosla:We have realised that when you spacialise information, it actually identifies and points to the gaps in services to a city manager, to a city decision maker, in terms
Renu Khosla:We call our tool, the URBGOV, which is urban governance.
Renu Khosla:It's a specialised uh, data decision making platform, uh, which uses GIS, and uh, it collects the information on city infrastructure and then overlays it with data
Renu Khosla:It's got built in algorithms, which are then used by the city to actually take decisions which are not subjective.
Renu Khosla:They're very objective decisions which will allow you, which will inform the city officials, uh, that this is where the service is missing or this is
Renu Khosla:This is about bringing equity.
Renu Khosla:One of the aspects of this system is that it has what is called CENT, which is a citizen engagement tool.
Renu Khosla:It's a platform, it's a space that has been created where the community data can go up to the city because our experience has shown that while we collect a lot of information from
Renu Khosla:That's the change that we wanted to bring about by using smart tools which is what cities understand.
Renu Khosla:The other problem with our data is that, if we granularise it too much, a city is unable to use it.
Renu Khosla:So while the granularity is required at the grassroot level where we are designing solutions and where we are localising solutions, we are contextualising them,
Renu Khosla:So I think what at this point of time CURE is trying to do is to understand how cities, take decisions and to then try and curate mechanisms by which
Kim Ozano:It sounds amazing.
Kim Ozano:Very impressive, and, and I think our listeners will be very interested in that tool.
Kim Ozano:I am so sad we've run out of time.
Kim Ozano:I think I could have sat here for a whole hour.
Kim Ozano:Lillian, could you take us home with what's the one piece of advice you would give to people from 20 years experience of working to try to make
Lilian Otiso:Um, it's a process.
Lilian Otiso:It takes time.
Lilian Otiso:You do get some gains and you should celebrate those.
Lilian Otiso:So don't feel frustrated and it's small steps and nudging and knowing who to reach out to.
Lilian Otiso:Most importantly, listening to the voice of the community and those that we want to work with, think for me, that's the most critical part.
Kim Ozano:Thank you very much.
Kim Ozano:Renu.
Kim Ozano:Last piece of advice, please,
Renu Khosla:Collaborate.
Renu Khosla:I think we need to collaborate with women because women's voices matter and we need to shift from our legacy practices of upgrading, which is giving lower quality of services, to integration
Renu Khosla:So collaborate.
Kim Ozano:Wonderful.
Kim Ozano:Thank you so much.
Kim Ozano:Collaborate and be resilient as well.
Kim Ozano:I think from what Lillian was saying there.
Kim Ozano:So thank you both.
Kim Ozano:This has been a wonderful space to explore your work and I think there's a lot of take home messages and learning there for our listeners.
Kim Ozano:As always, thank you to our listeners.
Kim Ozano:Please do like rate, share and subscribe so we can continue to bring voices like we have today to improve community engagement in all the work we do.
