Facebook launches Project17 for gender equality partnerships

19 / 03 / 2020

By Marwa Nassar - -

Facebook launched Project17 which is a new initiative that takes a partnership approach to help drive progress on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDG 17 calls for using partnerships to strengthen sustainable development work around the world.

Facebook considers realizing gender equality as a top priority.

With lack of data representing the biggest barrier for the UN to realize progress on SDGs, Facebook decided to work with gender equality organizations and experts to secure needed gender data which is critical to guiding the development of inclusive policies, programs and services, and for tracking progress on achieving gender equality.

Missing or unavailable data around women’s experiences creates gender data gaps, an incomplete picture of people’s experiences around the world, and an inability to accurately measure progress.

Gender data research and findings

Over the last six months, Facebook has met with partners and experts, including Data2x, Girl Effect and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data to better understand gender data needs and constraints.

It partnered with Ladysmith, an independent research firm, to conduct expert interviews, review academic research and produce a report identifying areas where tech companies can help strengthen the gender data ecosystem.

Ladysmith has issues a report identifying gender data gaps across many different areas, including the data used by policymakers to inform decisions and the data used to understand global challenges such as climate change induced migration.

The report found a lack of communication between tech companies and gender equality organizations, recommending they work closer together to close gender data gaps. It suggests tech companies leverage their resources, including data scientists, to uncover new insights from existing data, share some of their own privacy-protected, de-identified datasets, and develop new tools to help researchers answer critical questions.

Facebook Commitment

This research is a catalyst. Facebook will work with development organizations, experts and other trusted partners to leverage Facebook’s dataset to bridge gender data gaps, answer research questions, and help drive progress on gender equality.

First, Facebook will provide gender-based breakdowns of some of our existing Data for Good work. We asked our partners which insights would be most valuable if broken down by gender, and they highlighted Facebook’s Displacement Maps, which are part of our Disaster Maps product.

Displacement Maps already share real-time data on population movement with humanitarian response agencies, helping to determine community-specific needs in times of crisis.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), a Facebook partner, explained how sharing this data could help humanitarian aid agencies meet the needs of affected communities more efficiently. Early results show that partners with access to these maps understand what proportion of those displaced are men and women, where women are relocating, and when they are able to return. All of these calculations use aggregated and de-identified data from people using Facebook on their devices who have opted in to location history.

Next, in partnership with the World Bank Group and EqualMeasures2030, Facebook will leverage the wide reach of our apps to run a global survey focused on gender equality. This will build on the success of the Future of Business survey, which Facebook has been partnering with the World Bank and OECD on to survey small businesses around the world on Facebook.

Facebook is also working with The Institute for Technology and Social Change, TechChange, to develop educational tools that share information about the ways unconventional datasets could be used in gender and development projects.

Throughout 2020, Facebook will continue to explore what datasets that should be build to provide helpful insights based on the priorities identified in the report. Again, all data shared will be anonymized, aggregated and de-identified.