When a new drug becomes available, manufacturers don’t simply stock their warehouses and wait for people to order it. They send representatives to medical offices to train medical professionals when and how to prescribe the drug, help them understand its limitations and think about which patients could most benefit.
Similarly, you may need to invest in helping people positioned to make a difference make use of your data.
Build data literacy. Data literacy helps decision makers make choices based on insights drawn from data rather than their own intuition. Often, initiatives and campaigns focused on ending child labour focus heavily on data or individual stories. Effective efforts weave both together in ways that can help people take action that both feels meaningful and is meaningful.
For actors who may be less accustomed to using your data, you may want to translate it into scales that feel more relatable. One way to do this is to identify the pervasiveness of an issue in terms that feel meaningful.
Instead of simply using raw numbers, like, “As per Census 2011, the total child population in India in the age group (5-14) years is 259.6 million. Of these, 10.1 million (3.9% of total child population) are working, either as ‘main worker’ or as ‘marginal worker’.
With so many numbers in just one sentence, readers might easily check out, get distracted or fail to appreciate the scope of the problem. For some, a problem that affects just 3.9 percent of the child population may not rise to significance among policymakers. Another way to express this point might be to say “today, more than 10 million of our country’s children are working. These numbers are at an all-time low, suggesting that meaningful policies and a focused effort on keeping children in school where they belong will bring us close to ending child labour forever.”
For actors whose support and action is critical, you might consider hosting workshops and webinars that focus on helping a specific group decision makers interpret the data in the context of their own constituents and people they care about and work together to identify meaningful solutions drawing heavily on what has worked in other countries or regions or is starting to work in their own.
Additionally, these kinds of workshops and webinars create opportunities to collect feedback and insights that you can apply to future efforts.
