The first thousand days of a child are the most important ones to guarantee a healthy development. IMAPI is a Nurturing Care Municipality Index that combines over 100 metrics that are strongly related to environmental development in these first days of a child’s life. The project is an 18-month effort from a diverse group of professionals to put together databases from 2015 and 2016 from all 5.570 municipalities in Brazil, to create a sound, peer-reviewed methodology, and to make the results publicly available.
And by diverse we mean that all metrics, sources, domains, and details that describe the Index were selected and reviewed by a committee of experts in the fields of public health, applied by a team of data scientists, validated by a group of epidemiologists and government stakeholders, and made visual and accessible by a team of information, data, graphic, and interface designers, and data strategists.
One grand Index ranks all municipalities, and 5 domains (health, early learning, responsive care, nutrition, and safety and protection) composed by 31 variables, characterize the strengths and weaknesses of every Brazilian city.
The Brazilian coffee flower inspired the visual metaphor chosen for the main visualization - it's something delicate that needs nourishing, but that also has a strong history of comfort, family, and care. Each petal indicates a domain's value, making it possible to quickly understand whether it is a strong suit of that municipality or if it needs further attention, investment, or care.
It is a one-of-a-kind project in Latin America, designed by specialists, meant to support better decision-making for health officials and mayors, as well as to allow a better comprehension of a city’s public investments on early childhood development. To that end, the project focused on developing an open access web platform and, understanding that it takes more than...
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The first thousand days of a child are the most important ones to guarantee a healthy development. IMAPI is a Nurturing Care Municipality Index that combines over 100 metrics that are strongly related to environmental development in these first days of a child’s life. The project is an 18-month effort from a diverse group of professionals to put together databases from 2015 and 2016 from all 5.570 municipalities in Brazil, to create a sound, peer-reviewed methodology, and to make the results publicly available.
And by diverse we mean that all metrics, sources, domains, and details that describe the Index were selected and reviewed by a committee of experts in the fields of public health, applied by a team of data scientists, validated by a group of epidemiologists and government stakeholders, and made visual and accessible by a team of information, data, graphic, and interface designers, and data strategists.
One grand Index ranks all municipalities, and 5 domains (health, early learning, responsive care, nutrition, and safety and protection) composed by 31 variables, characterize the strengths and weaknesses of every Brazilian city.
The Brazilian coffee flower inspired the visual metaphor chosen for the main visualization - it's something delicate that needs nourishing, but that also has a strong history of comfort, family, and care. Each petal indicates a domain's value, making it possible to quickly understand whether it is a strong suit of that municipality or if it needs further attention, investment, or care.
It is a one-of-a-kind project in Latin America, designed by specialists, meant to support better decision-making for health officials and mayors, as well as to allow a better comprehension of a city’s public investments on early childhood development. To that end, the project focused on developing an open access web platform and, understanding that it takes more than just beautifully crafted visualizations and UX to incorporate the usage of data in a culture, there's a full section dedicated to advocacy.
The web platform was developed to be interactive, intuitive and simple to navigate and understand. It allows a high-level view of the Index, comparisons between states and cities, and also a deep dive into one particular city, domain or indicator of interest. It is an open database and open method project, allowing researchers and policy-makers to continue the work, analyzing the specifics and complexities of their region.
That said, it deserves the award because it is an incredible collaboration between academics, data scientists, epidemiologists, with support from the Ministry of Health and official health organizations in Brazil, and was made accessible by the innovative design from two data and information design companies. It tackles not only early childhood development, an ongoing and important issue worldwide, but also allows real data transparency by delivering information to the general public through simple, easy-to-understand, interactive data visualizations.
More than just an Index, it is a social tool and framework for government decision-making based on data that can inspire other governments and cities to implement similar measurements of great national impact.
The project is co-funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) and the Brazilian Ministry of Health. It is part of the first Grand Challenges Explorations in the foundation's Data Science program.
What is novel about this project is that it transcended its proposal, going from a research project to an active propositional tool for municipal level decision and policy-makers in Brazil.
It is based on the Nurturing Care Framework, developed by the World Health Organization for primary care. The variables selected are characterized in a social-ecological model, understanding that variables from the child’s direct family (proximal) are more impactful in its future than the ones from favorable policy-making (distal).
Once selected, these variables were weighted by experts in health, primary care, and epidemiology. Then, a team of data scientists collected, analyzed and standardized all variables from 2015 and 2016, making it possible to comprehend which were reliable and which weren't. Apart from the 31 selected variables, there are at least 100 others collected from more than 10 different data sources that characterized each city, calculating rates and normalizing indicators so the Grand Index can be comparable considering their complexities, sizes, and specificities.
Muriel Gubert, Gabriela Buccini, Marcos Barreto as co-principal investigators, alongside their team, have accomplished all of this, giving this project its solid background in science, enabling the work of Odd.Studio and Café.art.br.
Odd.Studio, a science, design and tech studio from Brazil, supports B&MGF in data science, helping translate and transform data into actionable, useful deliverables. To do so, they apply their own data product framework, inspiring researchers off their comfort zones and challenging them to go further.
Understanding how difficult it is to apply data science and analytics in formal and bureaucratic spaces, Odd.Studio envisioned the development of an impactful visualization, explaining the work put into the method, in layers of comprehension.
For this, they reached out to Café.art.br, a multi-award-winning data visualization and experience design studio that gave life to IMAPI and the Flower, it's main visualization, transforming the extensive amount of data into an interactive and intuitive data visualization tool.
Considering the multiple layers of information, the tool was designed so government officials can have a bird's eye view of their city and compare it to cities of the same geographical region or with similar size and make. With very few clicks they can drill down and deepen their understanding of how each indicator influences the Index, their individual importance as well as how they were calculated. The tool was also designed taking into consideration it's use on mobile devices, thus making it easier to access and to share the data.
