Mapping Care: Innovative tools for georeferencing care supply and demand
Governments (past: District Government of Bogota; currently implementing: National Government of Dominican Republic)
The 2030 Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and UNDP Strategic Plan 2022-2025, highlight that gender equality and women's empowerment are essential for the achievement of sustainable development. LAC countries are taking action to address the structural causes of gender inequality, as well as its consequences. In this line, many countries are advancing not only in care policies that recognize, reduce, and redistribute care work, but in comprehensive care systems. The design process of a comprehensive care system is complex and requires gathering exhaustive evidence about different issues. Collecting and systematizing georeferenced indicators is key to prevent implementation gaps.
The Gender Team of UNDP-LAC has developed a Care Georeferencing Tool, which aims to facilitate the construction of care maps - a key instance during the design of comprehensive care policies and systems- and help build diagnoses about the social organization of care that are sensitive to territorial specificities.
This tool has four main objectives. Firstly, it systematizes and generates updated, real-time information about the care supply within a city or area. Secondly, it studies the territorial distribution of the population that needs or may need care, such as children, persons with disabilities and/or elders. Thirdly, it analyses whether the care supply is sufficient when compared to the care demands of the population in that territory. Lastly, it provides the possibility to automate data visualization processes to help decisionmakers swiftly identify areas that need to improve the coverage and accessibility to care services.In order to do this, the tool exploits different data sources and innovative methodologies, ranging from traditional demographic and economical analysis to webscrapping, data mining and collaborative mapping.
This tool represents a digital solution that fills information gaps related to the social organization of care in urban and rural territories, thus collaborating in the design of policies that have a direct impact on women, particularly women from vulnerable groups.
1. We identified, described and georeferenced 4169 private care centers in Bogota through data mining, which were previously unidentified by the local authorities. 2. We engaged with local women caretakers and civil society organizations to search for community-based care initiatives in Bogota, and identified, described and georeferenced 77 of these initiatives though collaborative mapping. 3. We supported 5 local governments in Uruguay, computing accessibility gaps to 20 different policies that promote women's autonomy and empowerment, in 198 towns and cities in urban and rural areas, considering different transportation modes (driving, transit, walking). 4. We are currently supporting 3 municipalities in the Dominican Republic to map care services from the private and the community sector.
The Care Georeferencing Strategy has already been applied in Bogota (Colombia), Uruguay, and is currently in implementation stage in the Dominican Republic. Its different stages (mapping care supply; mapping care demand; identifying and quantifying accessibility gaps; visualizing data) and the methodologies and data sources applicable in each of them have been tested and validated. In each case, local and national governments leading care policy design have been key stakeholders, and agreements were made to exchange input data and results. We have plans to expand the application of this digital solution to different countries in Latin American and the Caribbean (and in other regions), especially if they are in the process of designing national and local care policies and systems. In the short term, we are planning to expand this tool to Peru, Chile and potentially other municipalities of Colombia.
