The third IDEAMAPS Lounge Webinar featured speakers from India, Nigeria, and Brasil representing community data collectors and advocates as well as academia. As in previous webinars, the speakers discussed issues related to "exchange" of data, knowledge, and trust with other stakeholders. The focus of this discussion especially highlighted the added value (for community members, and data quality) of involving communities in data collection and reporting results back to them in accessible formats.
Vinod Rao, a consultant at SPARC India, and Selvi Devendran, a Mahila Milan (women together) Leader, held a public dialogue about the realities of deprived areas in Mumbai in 2020 and local initiatives in the ARISE Consortium. Selvi spoke about her former and new community following a government slum resettlement project, her role in data collection and mobilising food distribution for 1500 neighbours during India's national lockdown earlier this year, and how her role in a local political party has been essential for trust building and collaboration between her community and local government.
Elsa Rousset, a Project Manager at Justice and Empowerment Initiative, and Adesola Adelani Dada, a community data collector in the local Slum Dwellers International Federation, spoke about the role of data in responding to COVID needs this year, and a citywide household energy survey implemented across hundreds of slums and informal settlements in Lagos. Adesola emphasised the importance of pre-survey engagements to identify community leaders and gain their buy-in before fieldwork. He also pointed out that gaining community buy-in before survey fieldwork improves that quality and completeness of results.
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Flavia Feitosa, an Assistant Professor in Geography and Geoscience at the Federal University of ABC, spoke about the MAPPA Project which worked closely with a local government and a housing agency to integrate diverse spatial datasets to model the location and type of precarious settlements (favelas and informal settlements). She also described an iterative modelling-fieldwork process that enabled identification of previously unidentified precarious settlements, and multiple rounds of essential field validation data collection.
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