I spent years writing reports that measured other people’s risk: safety incidents, environmental compliance, numbers that protected companies from liability. I never once asked who was measuring mine, or who gets to measure anything in the communities those reports were written about.
The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data’s Data Values Advocate Program answered that question for me before I even knew I was asking it. It paired me with a mentor who pushed me past good enough, gave me a curriculum that turned me from a compliance officer into someone who builds systems for others to own their evidence, and put me in rooms with UN Women statisticians and Hewlett Foundation officers. That same program carried me from Harare to the Global Data Festival in Nairobi, among 1,300+ delegates from 69 countries, and left me with connections I could not have built alone, including with ICON Data and Learning Labs, Sightsavers, and Equality Insights.
I am not the same professional I was a year ago. And because I changed, so did Choruwa, a rural ward in Murehwa District, Zimbabwe. It ended with a woman named Betty finding her voice in a room that had never had reason to listen to her.
The problem: a morning no one was counting
In rural Zimbabwe, firewood remains the primary cooking fuel for the overwhelming majority of rural households, and it’s women and girls who walk to collect it, often for hours.
Betty’s routine, head of her household, up at 4am, walking 5km for firewood, repeats itself every day in Choruwa. It has never once been counted. That gap, between what women like Betty live as their reality and what policymakers read in reports, is what Inclusive Data for Inclusive Energy was built to close.
Training women to count their own mornings
Working across Choruwa, Murehwa, and Mazowe, I trained 30 women as Lead Data Champions and supported them to collect gender-disaggregated energy data from 100 households, using Shona-language surveys and logbooks they helped design. We ran the training as “Africa Day with a difference,” using art to teach data collection, presentation, and ethics to women who had never been asked to think of themselves as data collectors, let alone data champions.
It was not a straight line: Ten days in, insecurity at one site forced a pivot to a new community, where a Salvation Army Lieutenant vouched for us and helped rezbuild trust with residents. That detour reflected something important about the methodology, because this work depends on communities supporting what we’re working toward.
There is a moment I keep returning to. Betty stood before local leaders in Choruwa, in a grey jacket over traditional African attire, her voice shaky at first, her first time speaking to leaders who held that kind of authority. As she read her own numbers, the shake gave way to momentum. 4am starts. 5km walked for firewood. What it cost her family when the wood ran low. By the time she finished, she was not reciting. She was presenting evidence she owned.
I have heard versions of Betty’s story for years in my ESG work, in policy documents that name “stakeholder engagement” but never quote the stakeholder. Watching her stand before leaders who never had reason to write her name into an official record, I understood why I became a Data Values Advocate: not to teach women like Betty how to count, but to help what they already counted land somewhere real.
On the record: a woman’s morning, finally written down
Data literacy among participants rose by an estimated 25 percent over the course of the project, and some women began teaching their neighbors, unprompted. 20 of the 30 women were certified as Lead Data Champions, now equipped to run this work without me.
The outcome that matters most was a governance one, not a workshop one: Local leaders signed written commitments to fold citizen-generated data into local energy planning, bringing gender-disaggregated household energy data into planning discussions. One signer, a woman leader herself, said: “Now we have a job, to see these problems are solved.”
My experience as a Data Values Advocate
The Data Values Manifesto gave me a foundation I lacked: how data gets collected, who is trusted to hold it, who never gets asked. Fatuma Faarah held our cohort together, always reachable, and paired me with mentor Florence Nguuni, whose feedback never let me settle for good enough. The data gaps of Zimbabwe are not unique. This is everywhere someone has not yet been asked what they know, and the Global Partnership is one of the few places actually asking.
One thread ran through the Global Data Festival: data as a tool for people, not systems. What stayed with me most was the youth-led conversation on the post-2030 development agenda, where young people were not invited to comment; we were the panel. That energy carried into my lightning talk, “The Data Was Always There,” the story of 30 women who surveyed 100 households and walked away with signed commitments. When the room applauded, it was for Betty.
Looking forward: the work that lives on
This advocate program has ended. What it gave me has not. I carry it forward through Thallo Thinkers, the organization I built so Betty’s morning never has to be counted twice. I carry it forward at Eco Haven, where the same principle applies: measure what’s real, trust the people closest to the risk. And I carry it into Mukadzi AI, a Shona-language advisory tool built with an AI engineer, the same approach now rebuilt for smallholder farmers.
The data was always there. It just needed someone to ask, and then get out of the way. Five of us were asked this year. I am still counting what that made possible, in Choruwa and in myself.
