About This Project

The concept for this project began at an event called a hackathon held by Bread for the World Institute in partnership with the website, HelpMeViz.com. At Bread for the World Institute, we wanted to come up with a compelling way of visualizing women’s empowerment around the world. We partnered with a group of volunteers who specialize in helping nonprofit organizations like ours visualize the stories they want to tell from the data they have on hand.

The United Nations has defined a set of 52 indicators essential to telling the story of women’s empowerment. This is by far the largest, most comprehensive set of gender indicators ever assembled. However, more than half of the indicators average less than one data point per country from 1990 to 2013. Telling the story then is quite challenging. Millions of women—especially in developing countries—remain in the shadows.

The volunteers are coders, data scientists, statisticians, and graphic designers, and they offered to lend us their specialized skills in an event called a hackathon. On June 21, 2014, we invited them to Bread for the World Institute to sort through all the available official data sets we could get our hands on. Mostly what we had to offer them were spreadsheets with lots of empty cells.

This tool maps the availability of all 52 indicators related to women’s empowerment in sub-Saharan African countries since 1990. On the vertical axis appear five domains of empowerment (Economic Participation, Education, Health, Public Life & Decision Making, Human Rights) containing all 52 indicators, while the horizontal axis lists all low-income countries in the region.

The “pixels” show how much of the data are missing. A pixel is opaque when there are no data available for a given indicator and country. A pixel is saturated with color when data are collected annually for an indicator and country.

If every country were collecting data annually on all of the indicators, the portrait of the woman would be entirely visible. The less data we have, the less we see of her.

Women are barely visible in all regions of the developing world. Before the hackathon, we found no attempts to visualize the gaping holes in women’s empowerment data. Now, thanks to what we were able to produce in the hackathon and follow-up work, the 2015 Hunger Report website features an interactive tool that shows users in a single glance just how far we have to go to bring women out of the shadows.

Bread for the World Institute would like to thank the following volunteers who participated in the hackathon: Akintunde Akinseye, Seth Blanchard, Christina Brady, Ben Chartoff, Evelyn Chou, Minchau Dinh, Michael Herman, Anupam Kumar, Emily Kund, Zach McDade, William Monson, Rizqi Rachmat, Tamára Ramos, Jonathan Robinson, Reshma Roshania, Jennifer Stark, Leah Stern, Daniel Wolfe, David Woo, and Lindsay Young.

A special thanks to Jon Schwabish of HelpMeViz.com for organizing and helping lead the hackathon, and to Xan Gregg, Keith Hughitt, Lee Mendelowitz, Joseph Paulson, and Asal Nassir for dedicating many additional hours following the hackathon.