Extractive industries such as the mining of sand and coal have led to a range of environmental impacts in the Mekong River Basin, including a loss of native seeds and fish species, changes in water flow, water contamination, and job losses in agriculture and fisheries. A Thai environmental advocate who took part in a data skills training program in June 2024 said that she had discovered new data strategies that would help her raise awareness of these problems.
Combining the “hard power” of data analytics with the “soft power” of narrative and personal appeals can be a powerful recipe for effective advocacy. But too often, grassroots activists lack the technical skills to supercharge their work with data-driven evidence and insights.
Using data effectively for advocacy can be particularly challenging for Indigenous Peoples, who tend to be underrepresented in official statistics, often experience discrimination, and may face a lack of recognition—of themselves, individually and collectively, and of their land and resources. For Women Environmental Defenders, the result is often a lack of control over their own stories. Gaining data skills can be empowering.
In the Lower Mekong Basin, the East-West Management Institute (EWMI), an international NGO, has been working via its Open Development Initiative (ODI) to facilitate grassroots movements. Their programs in the region have a special focus on forestry and environmental issues, Indigenous Peoples' rights, and data sovereignty, and support Women Environmental Defenders in particular. Recognizing that stronger data-related skills and capacity would help “level the playing field” for grassroots activists, EWMI-ODI offers data skills training opportunities as part of their work.
In June 2024, with support from the World Bank, EWMI-ODI hosted a data storytelling workshop to aid Women Environmental Defenders in their advocacy efforts. One training participant from a health NGO in Vietnam noted that “learning to use tools like Flourish, Pivot Tables, and Canva, along with techniques for cleaning and standardizing data, significantly enhanced my ability to produce professional products for our community.” By the end of the course, she created a leaflet highlighting the benefits of adopting innovative farming practices and the positive impact of gender equality on community participation.
EWMI-ODI’s data skills training programs date back to 2019, when World Bank funding supported an initial pilot in the Mekong Region. The pilot was an adaptation of an innovative data skills training model created by the World Bank’s Development Data Group. Building upon this successful pilot, EWMI-ODI's training programs have gone beyond technical data skills, emphasizing the importance of integrating data into personal and cultural narratives, with funding from a wider community of donors and partner organizations. EWMI-ODI eventually rolled out training programs to more than 300 additional participants across a total of ten Asian countries. As a result, the impact of the World Bank’s seed funding and initial technical input was multiplied many times over. These experiences and the lessons that emerged are documented in a set of case studies intended to help others interested in creating similar programs.
The training programs aim to give participants a solid foundation in finding, evaluating, analyzing, and presenting data. A participant from Thailand, for example, then used a free digital mapping tool (Mapeo) to collect data on the location of elderly community members and those with disabilities across ten villages to enable immediate and targeted help in case of a natural disaster. In Cambodia, Indigenous training participants have used the same tool to make evidence-based claims to safeguard their land tenure and rights.
But the programs also go a step beyond number crunching and data visualization, emphasizing ways that advocates can weave data into stories told in their own voices, with storytellers using data (or evidence or lived experiences) to craft and present narratives from their own perspectives. Every culture has its own stories and narratives, and good data storytelling helps people communicate the cause and effect of an issue. These stories can become potent calls for action.
Integrating data literacy and storytelling training into existing programs has helped EWMI-ODI enhance the skills of people within the community forestry network to help them increase the effectiveness of their advocacy for Indigenous rights. One of the women leaders participating in a project on Indigenous Women’s Storytelling in Vietnam summed up the experience by saying, “We all feel surprised when looking at the stories we made and the process we went through to achieve this. [The stories are about] simple things around us but [it is] so important and valuable to express our ethnicity’s characteristics. I’m so proud of it.”
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