SAFANSI The South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative a picture is worth a thousand words Development interventions like projects members of women’s self-help groups which supported by the World Bank all intend to have have been engaged in PVP empowerment- impacts that outlast the life of the projects related activities over time, making them natural themselves. Establishing a useful source of partners to have “on the ground.” Women’s information that project participants and their self-help groups throughout much of rural neighbors can continue to use is one of the India generally are often seen as optimal such most effective ways to achieve this. This is not partners given their activism, purposefulness, information about them that is collected and and storied history of effective mobilization for analyzed by outsiders; it is information that social and economic purposes. comes from them. They are the agents who actively collect and use it. One of the challenges that emerges right away however is how to present that information in a way that is readily accessible and straightforward, including to those who may lack literacy or numeracy, as is the case in so many rural settings. Information graphics is a means of making complex quantitative information readily understandable and relatable in a way that enables people to draw comparisons and to track changes over time. The Pudhu Vaazhvu Project (PVP) in Tamil Nadu is making purposeful use of information graphics through participatory data visualization and tracking, or “P-tracking” as it is more often abbreviated. The PVP is a community-driven development, poverty reduction operation being carried out by the state government through its Department of Rural Development and Panchayat Raj with technical and financial PVP SHG members looking at the prototype visualizations assistance by the World Bank. The P-tracking (Photo credit: Ramya Parthasarathy) system developed in collaboration with project participants is used to periodically monitor Designing the visualizations used to undertake a number of important indicators relating to P-tracking would begin with focus group livelihoods, health, nutrition, food security, discussions in which the self-help group and household well-being. The participants are members were solicited for their views about January 2017 South Asia Region the quality of life, and about the elements that easier to discuss, for instance a blossom was make up a “good life.” These needed to be used to indicate whether the marriage was articulated in the form of indicators that could consensual, and the color of the flower itself be readily monitored. A pilot was carried out whether the marriage was to a blood relative. in the Theni district of southwest Tamil Nadu where 32000 women belonging to self-help Visualization of assets placed important groups active in the PVP were surveyed in focus property items like a house, land, different groups in 80 gram panchayats – the village livestock animals, a motorbike and so on into level institutions at the base of Indian states’ a box to represent what the household owns panchayat raj systems of local government. or has owned. Items that have recently been The process of interviewing focus groups was lost are circled in red, and those which have then aggregated up to the district, block, and been acquired are circled in green. Arranging state levels, culminating in the composition these images together provides a very quickly of a questionnaire. The questions themselves understandable schematic of how well or poorly reflected the women’s priorities and concerns a village is doing. basic issues like sanitation and nutrition, as well as matters of empowerment like women’s Daily diets were represented by plates upon roles in household decision making and political which food items like rice, papaya, chicken, and participation. eggplant are placed, their size reflecting how often they were eaten. Here too, the women’s The women’s visualization of marriage for feedback quickly made the representation more instance began with a simple flower icon in familiar by changing the plate into a far more which the height of the flower represented the familiar banana leaf, and the imaging would be marriage’s length, and the number of leaves adapted to reflect local diets as the exercise represented the number of children. The use of was scaled up and introduced across different a more abstract flower icon rather than a human villages and districts. figure made more potentially sensitive matters Women’s roles in household decision making regarding matters like asset management, bank loans, children’s healthcare and education, clothing, and so on. A series of iterations were involved in familiarizing the women with histograms that dispense with the use of icons to simply capture relative proportions. The prototype developed through the 2,000-woman pilot in Theni district would lead to a list of 72 multiple-choice questions that was scaled up into a participatory survey of 32,636 women self-help group women elsewhere in Tamil Nadu where the PVP was active. The design ensured that the questions and the visualization of results in schematic forms remained readily accessible to even the least literate and least Women in tribal areas giving there feedback on the initial visualizations (Photo Credit: Jeyachitra P.) numerate women. 2 Flowers and marriage: community created visualitazions based on marriage Each flower depicts a bundle of indicators pertaining to marriage. One flower represents one married woman. The height of the flower corresponds to the age at marriage where shorter flowers are women that got married at younger ages. The color of the flower represnts whether the marriage was with a blood relative (red) or not (yellow). The type of flower represents whether the woman gave consent (bloomed) to being married or not (unbloomed). The number of leaves represent the number of children in marriage. Yet the visualizations themselves are quite information enough to participate in discussions sophisticated, capturing multiple relationships about it. between data points that have a bearing on well-being, for instance marriage, food, and Very importantly, the visualizations enabled the sanitation. This multivariate display reveals women to compare indicators from different interesting higher-order relationships between villages. These “actionable” visualizations these dimensions. Redundancy, used to express suggested practical actions the women could the same data in multiple ways, was a useful way take to improve their well-being. The use of to communicate information to women with very a color spectrum proved indispensable. The different educational backgrounds, including women arrived at a color scheme between those who had no history of education at all. green (connoting positive qualities) and gray Photographs, cartoon images, colors, numerical (connoting negative ones). scales, were among the representations used. Even for the visualizations that used some text Once all the visualizations had been gathered, such as the histograms, a viewer who is both the next step was to place them into a familiar illiterate and innumerate can still understand the context, in this case situating each of the icons 3 within a village scene. In the village scene holding money represented spending, the depicted below, the three women gathered banana tree nutrition, and the toilet sanitation. around the well represented community The women focused on villages and on participation, the couple talking in front of the comparisons between villages, and were much house represented decision making within the less interested in district-level comparisons household, and the couple riding a scooter which they felt would abstract the considerable represented social mobility. The woman figure diversity between different types of villages. Assert change: Community created visualizations based on assets The change in assets of families in the village are shown. Green items have been gained in the last five years. Red items have been lost. Unshaded items were in possession both five years ago and now. Partners SA FANSI Administered by: This results series highlights development results, operational innovations and lessons emerging from the South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative (SAFANSI) of the World Bank South Asia region. Disclaimer: The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply any judgment on the part of The World Bank concerning the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries.