Tactical Tech has been working with two sex-worker collectives in India and Cambodia to explore how community-based organisations can use data and evidence in their advocacy. This two-and-a-half year project was a collaboration between Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) in Calcutta, India, and the Women's Network for Unity (WNU) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
This write-up is the first in a series documenting the project, and focuses on Tactical Tech's work with DMSC - a forum of 65,000 sex workers campaigning for the rights of sex workers.
What is evidence-based advocacy?
In order to influence people's perceptions, campaigners must make strong arguments based on fact and evidence. A challenge in communicating evidence derived from large amounts of data is to demystify it and present key pieces clearly. Visualisation is a good way to do this. It is this combination of compelling evidence presented visually to suit a target audience that we call evidence-based advocacy.
Katherine O'Reilly of Simon Fraser University in Canada explains how important it is to think about what you are trying to measure and which indicators to use in order to tell a story: