**This article is written by Francisco Resnicoff, undersecretary for international and institutional relations, and Marisa Miodosky, director for partnerships at the secretariat for gender equality, Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
**

How can we turn Buenos Aires into a city where women can enjoy public space without the threat of aggression or violence?

In 2016, when the city began to incorporate the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development into a concrete plan of action, we were faced with just this challenge.

This led us to create the Buenos Aires Gender Indicator System (SIGBA), which measures disparities in women’s physical and economic independence. The idea was to mainstream the United Nations’ fifth sustainable development goal (SDG) — to ensure efficient and effective gender equality — into all facets of public policy.

Since then, SIGBA has given the women of Buenos Aires the power to influence key decisions in both the public and private sphere. We’ve learned a few things along the way, and we think that policy-makers everywhere can learn from them.

How women travel

Firstly, this project has taught us that the best policies to improve women’s autonomy are those that are anchored to citizen participation and open government. One example of this can be seen in how we have adapted mobility policies — a crucial factor when it comes to accessing opportunities.

Around 99.7% of Buenos Aires’ population has access to public transport within five blocks from their homes.

But for many women, mobility continues to be inextricably linked to traditional gender roles. Women perform the majority of care-giving tasks and unpaid work (for instance, taking kids to school and getting food supplies while on their way to work). For this reason, their mobility needs are different from those of most men. This is coupled with the way women tend to travel — in shorter, more frequent trips, and often in the company of children or those they are assisting.

In addition, vulnerable residential communities are often characterised by narrow streets paved on irregular ground, with public transport stops located on the neighbourhood’s outskirts. While they have access to public transport, women who live in these neighbourhoods face the added challenge of having to commute from their communities to the rest of the city.

For many women, mobility continues to be inextricably linked to traditional gender roles

Taken together, this made it absolutely essential to tailor mobility policies to women’s real lives.

The BA SDG 16+ Lab: Gender, Mobility, and Security in Rodrigo Bueno was set up by the Buenos Aires city government, and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in Rodrigo Bueno, a vulnerable neighbourhood in the city. Spurred on by the opportunity to co-create innovative solutions to the challenges already outlined, the lab's ultimate objective is to accelerate the achievement of the Global Goals.

Rooted in SDG 16, a cross-cutting goal that promotes open government and citizen participation to co-create policies, the lab team generates evidence-based data to improve mobility in ways that directly reduce gender disparity.

Real-time data, real-world insights

The way the lab team collects and employs data is highly innovative. Here's how they do it.

The team's staff cross-reference information from conventional data sources, such as sociodemographic censuses and the BA Open Data platform, with non-conventional sources, such as social data and Open Street Maps, crowd-mapping, and in-depth interviews with women residing in the neighbourhood. With these, they are able to acquire a fuller and more accurate understanding of why, how, where, with whom and how often local women move around.

Having women actively participate in this process enables the lab team to translate their needs into actionable data. A space-mapping approach initiated by the lab team for instance first uses a mobile app installed on women’s phones to collect data in real-time and then analyse the variables that affect their mobility.

The team was able to create a comprehensive response to improve women’s quality of life through a range of small, medium and large scale solutions that can easily be applied in other contexts

Through this, we found that bus travel accounts for 25% of all women’s commutes, while bicycle travel accounts for just 2%. This is because almost half of trips are taken with children, 50% of which are for care-giving activities, 30% for shopping, and 20% for education.

From data to tangible policy change

These tools are only useful if they produce effective decision-making. One way we’ve used data from the lab to influence policy is through what are called “collective intelligence workshops”.

These workshops bring together government departments, UNDP representatives and academics, to collectively interpret and evaluate the data in order to devise policies that address the three dimensions (physical, economic and decision-making) of women’s autonomy.

As a result, the team was able to create a comprehensive response to improve women’s quality of life through a range of small, medium and large scale solutions that can easily be applied in other contexts.

Some of the solutions discussed include moving traffic signs to reduce road safety hazards, increasing public transport flows before and after school hours, and adding more bus lines to and from the neighbourhood. We also installed bus stops around new housing complexes.

Each step in the lab team’s process has been meticulously registered, and feeds into the City’s Sustainable Mobility Plan for Vulnerable Neighbourhoods. All the apps used are in an open-source format, which made them easier to use in other neighbourhoods and cities around the world by replacing the current data with a new population group.

The SDGs are the exact tools we need, not to return to business as usual, but to take us far, far beyond, towards a fully inclusive, resilient and sustainable city

Without a doubt, the active participation of Rodrigo Bueno’s women has been the most important element in the success of the lab. Conventional data can only give us so much information, but when combined with non-conventional methods and women’s voices, it opens a whole spectrum of possibility to how we address urban challenges from an authentically local perspective.

The team’s approach to data-driven policy is similar when it comes to the formulation of more wide-reaching gender-related policies. The government’s Gender Roundtable (formed of city ministers and/or secretaries in charge of human and citizen development, housing, education, health and transport) develops tailored approaches for implementing the overall strategy in each government ministry or agency.

This has led to policies extending family leave for both parents, increasing credit lines for women entrepreneurs, and undertaking electoral reforms to ensure women make up at least half the electoral rolls for legislators, to name a few.

This approach enables us not just to better guarantee women’s rights, but also their economic advancement and representation in decision-making processes.

The SDGs are the exact tools we need, not to return to business as usual, but to take us far, far beyond, towards a fully inclusive, resilient and sustainable city. — Francisco Resnicoff and Marisa Miodosky

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