Project Abstract

The Office of Women’s Affairs is looking to make its Care System innovative in its objectives and how it uses data. The Care System is an initiative to reach female caregivers living in dire conditions. It brings services directly to those who often cannot leave their homes because of their domestic workload. Primary caregivers receive certified skillset training, well-being activities, and become part of community-building networks with professional facilitation. Others receive care and services to develop their autonomy. Importantly, the initiative is delivered to those in need and provides evidence on the value of redistributing care for closing gender gaps and economic recovery. That’s where data comes in.

Project Description & Overview

Women’s “time poverty” is a structural cause of gender inequality. In Bogota, the unpaid care burden falls disproportionately on women, reaching alarming proportions: 30% of Bogota’s female population are full-time unpaid caregivers. 90% of them are low-income and 33% lack time for self-care. In 2020, we launched Bogota´s Care System to address these challenges. Bogata would now like to expand its efforts by providing primary caregivers with certified skillset training, well-being activities, community, and other services to develop their autonomy.

For six months, Capstone students will use data-driven methods to understand program impact and identify new ways to increase traffic to facilities used for this work. Students will support the Office as it:

1. Hosts a consultation with beneficiaries in a mini-public format to understand which care issues and metrics of success it should prioritize. This consultation will be inspired by The GovLab’s Data Assembly and 100 Questions;
2. Launches a data collaborative with non-traditional data holders across the city (e.g. telecom operators) to reuse the data needed to subsequently measure these prioritized issues (such as traffic to care centers);
3. Applies the analysis in the form of real-world data-driven experiments to increase the uptake of services – leveraging a baseline and compare it post interventions. Experiments could include communications campaigns or changing how and where services are deployed.

This work will support Bogota’s Women and Gender Equality Policy. Students will be overseen by the Secretary of Women’s Affairs and a coordinating team.

Datasets

Students will have access to the survey and interview data that the Office collects to measure the average hours per month that women dedicate to unpaid care work, data on the gender gap in unpaid work between men and women, and the number of services the caregiver has accessed before entering into the program as well as the number of services the caregivers and people they care for have access to before the implementation of the program.

Following a mini-public with beneficiaries, students will also work with the Office as it collaborates with a private-sector data holder to access its data for assessment purposes. This data might include telecom data which could be used to map and understand how caregivers move through the city or some other proxy.

Competencies

• Spanish language proficiency is a plus
• Familiarity with issues facing women and caregivers
• Community engagement skills
• Data analytical skills
• Experimental design competencies

Learning Outcomes & Deliverables

1. Students will learn how to conduct monitoring and evaluation work to ensure the success of the Care System;
2. Students will learn to apply alternative datasets for the purposes of public policy and discover the role that data collaboratives can play in matching the supply and demand of data;
3. Students will learn how to engage with citizens around the “questions that matter” in ways that support Bogota’s efforts to restructure itself around care economies and better reach caregivers in dire conditions.

Students

Tarush Bahl, Yixuan Ma, La-Toya Niles, Xinyu Xu