ClimateCivix

Climate change is predicted to push an additional 68 to 135 million people into poverty by 2030, according to the World Bank. At the same time, a series of slow and fast-onset exposures and shocks are worsening existing health epidemics and creating new ones. Closely linked, these events are giving rise to new waves of poverty and health inequity that fall outside the scale and scope of long-standing aid models in communities already experiencing high poverty levels in geographically vulnerable settings. 
 
Communities experiencing severe poverty and intensifying climate events, such as those in Eastern DRC, are navigating significant climate impacts on daily life. However, these communities and the actors closest to them—community-based organizations— do not have timely access to reliable information in context. This is particularly the case regarding climate health—a threat that currently falls between traditional sectors of clinical, environmental, and agricultural climate-related work. ClimateCivix responds to this gap as well as deteriorating trust in public institutions-- highlighting the need for innovative and more distributed power to drive localized climate health risk reduction with displacement-prone communities. 

Finally, the groups most likely to experience the most intense health and poverty backslides in the climate crisis are also the ones most likely to be digitally isolated -- with less individual access to mobile phones and light to no digital footprints. Despite innovative workarounds, including synthetic data, assumptions built into data models are often overgeneralized and fail to account for key differences among these groups, especially women in severe poverty. However, this missing data is critical to including these groups in big data models, which inform climate policies and create more actionable community-based solutions for the most climate-vulnerable communities.

ClimateCivix enables grassroots organizations operating in different sectors to map, share and govern fast and slow climate threats in a shared geographic area with economically and socially marginalized groups, who are less likely to be literate, less likely to own their own mobile phone, and less likely to be included in big data models. Two key elements of ClimateCivix include: 

Localizing data that includes data governance: ClimateCivix is leveraging existing gaps in localized data for the climate crisis to devise innovative strategies that operationalize decolonial data strategies.

Responding to the climate health crisis at earlier time points and based on local conditions: ClimateCivix is targeting earlier time points to intervene before conditions escalate to clinically diagnosed and where scientific evidence has demonstrated small shifts at earlier time points can reduce severities of later health outcomes. But, to date, this potential intervention window is limited to one size fits all health education. Technology provides an efficient strategy to localize information and in doing so, increase the probability of action by high-risk community groups.

Deployment of ClimateCivix is divided into two phases. The focus of phase one includes crowd creation of micro-networks of grassroots organizations. We do this via climate health knowledge, learning, and innovation discussion series with community-based organizations engaged in different dimensions of the climate crisis in targeted communities. This discussion and engagement series aims to provide an onramp for a different type of local peer engagement that revolves around the climate crisis.

The backend of ClimateCivix consists of a database for storing incoming data during phase one and during phase two, a messaging feature for organizations to connect with each other, a processing engine for analyzing incoming data, and an API for providing access to data to ensure transparency and accountability among the data collective member organizations. ClimateCivix takes advantage of low/no code architecture to promote more sustainable pathways to adapt ClimateCivix in other settings, without the need for high-level technical expertise. Finally, ClimateCivix optimizes tools for data exporting, reporting, and analysis over time to inform climate health advocacy and action at local levels and as critical supplements to big data models.

This provides a turnkey approach to localizing climate health data and action through digital civic engagement via grassroots organizations--- designed to be adapted and scaled in many different displacement-prone settings.

ClimateCivix is designed to impact community-based organizations that are operating on the frontlines of the climate crisis in displacement-prone settings. In doing so,  it provides a hyper-local data and learning ecosystem to support local civil society networks working in different domains-- enabling more localized climate responses for marginalized segments of their communities.

One of the unique value propositions of ClimateCivix is targeting of hyper-local community-based organizations that do not have the organizational footprint or financial capacity to partner with larger global aid industry and government actors. This is a strategic group of actors who are, on one hand, a critical link to drive climate mitigation work adapted to local behavioral strategies with communities but, on the other hand, are largely locked out of higher-level discussions and decision-making.

Secondly, it is estimated that 59 million women in low- and middle-income countries became new users of the mobile Internet in 2021 (GSMA Report, 2022). But, evidence indicates there is a growing disparity between women in different socio-economic strata when it comes to how they utilize mobile Internet access. This difference is visible in data related to both digital economic activity as well as digital health. ClimateCivix provides a mechanism to systematically capture more digitally hidden segments of communities. Their absence from mainstream big data strategies translates into digital data systems that perpetually leave these sub-groups out of climate policy and practice. ClimateCivix provides innovative, safe strategies to include these marginalized groups.

Finally, ClimateCivix provides a proof-of-concept model for larger global actors to replicate and scale up in displacement-prone settings. This will benefit the larger aid and climate industry through practices to drive more cross-sectoral, localized strategies that provide the space for displaced communities to drive more innovation to solve complex climate problems in context. 

All members of the ClimateCivix team have both personal and extensive professional experience related to issues of health, displacement, and climate crisis. 

Fadhili Kyabira Father resides in the Uvira area of South Kivu Province, Eastern DRC. He has an academic and professional background in Information Technology. Mr. Kyabira is a strong advocate of women's digital inclusion and committed to environmental justice. Mr. Kayabira leads the CEAFPD team.

Sonia Navani has lived and worked in Central and East Africa, where she has had extensive experience working with local and global organizations to improve data related to gender-based violence, reproductive health, and digital health. Dr. Navani leads the DHDI team. 

ClimateCivix has moved beyond the conceptual phase and is currently deployed for a pilot of phase one in South Kivu province, Eastern DR Congo.

As a novel approach to operationalize decolonial data strategies in the climate health domain, ClimateCivix combines expertise and collaboration from many different fields of practice. We believe that this is a uniquely positioned vehicle to provide mentorship related to scaling, networking, and evaluating the impact of ClimateCivix. 

Data as a Lever of Power for Community-based Organizations: By cultivating local civic engagement around climate mitigation data, ClimateCivix places data governance at the center of this ecosystem. Repositioning local CBOs as data owners instead of data collectors is a central premise of ClimateCivix, as a digital civic engagement ecosystem.

Building Knowledge and Learning Between Organizations and Sectors: ClimateCivix is a digital ecosystem to share local innovations related to climate science advances. One group may focus on water and sanitation issues, while another group focuses on counseling gender-based violence survivors in the same areas. Between these two organizations, the first may excel at adapting climate science messages to integrate into community education sessions and collecting information on temperature and precipitation data to support existing work with local farmers, while the second organization's staff may excel at qualitative data collection to better understand behavioral coping strategies in the face of longer-term impacts, such as worsening food insecurity and other evolving behavioral shifts related to impacts of climate change in their communities in real-time.

Identification of Local Climate Behavioral Trends: A key element of ClimateCivix is to identify hyper-local patterns and relationships in the data that may not be apparent to individual organizations or sectors. When it comes to the slow-onset climate health crisis, climate change is forcing behavioral shifts due to changing environments. 

At the center of this is intensifying food and nutrition insecurity due to significant local agriculture disruptions, where long-term changes in food availability are forcing new food scarcity coping strategies to evolve. In 2021, 150 million more women were food insecure than men globally (Food Security and Gender Equality, CARE). Women, including pregnant women, are at increased risk of nutrition insecurity is actively underpinning an explosion of non-communicable diseases in low and middle-income countries. Diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases among others reflected in a growing obesity problem-- these are epidemics that can be more effectively mitigated now at earlier stages. However, it requires expanding data and reimagining risk reduction related to community health at time points prior to clinically diagnosable conditions. For this, a more intensified effort around non-clinical, environment, and place-based data is urgently required and repositioning power within communities provides a bottom-up approach to influencing behavior. 

The five-year impact goal for ClimateCivix is to improve local planning, community decision-making, and action with marginalized communities through the use of data-driven insights and climate science. 

In order to achieve this, the impact for the next year is to develop a scalable, adaptable proof of concept model that accelerates decolonial data practices and climate science with grassroots organizations in targeted displacement-prone areas. 

As we move out of the pilot phases, the project will assess impact via indicators designed to assess the level of function among the micro-networks of grassroots organizations.

We draw upon health behavior, information, and decolonial theories to inform our work. 

Decolonial data recognizes that data collection and analysis have been used to reinforce colonial power structures and perpetuate inequality. Within the current context of an information economy, data provides an important dimension of power. It's through repositioning this data that we seek to center marginalized voices, challenge dominant narratives, and reimagine how data can be applied. By acknowledging the power dynamics inherent in data, this provides a relatively new and efficient strategy to sow the seeds to reposition power within communities themselves. 

The backend of ClimateCivix consists of a database for storing incoming data during phase one and during phase two, a messaging feature for organizations to connect with each other, a processing engine for analyzing incoming data, and an API for providing access to data to ensure transparency and accountability among the data collective member organizations. ClimateCivix takes advantage of low/no code architecture to promote more sustainable pathways to adapt ClimateCivix in other settings, without the need for high-level technical expertise. Finally, ClimateCivix optimizes tools for data exporting, reporting, and analysis over time to inform climate health advocacy and action at local levels and as critical supplements to big data models. 

Ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion in a project is crucial to the success and impact of ClimateCivix. We have strategically sought out and included diverse perspectives at every stage of the project. This included forming diverse teams, engaging community members and community leaders/stakeholders from displacement-prone communities, and actively identifying systematic barriers. During the conception phase of this work, this included teams in the Middle East and Asia. We will also continually monitor and evaluate ClimateCivix to ensure that it remains grounded in decolonial data practices and underscores our central principles of inclusivity and equitablity.

ClimateCivix is designed to absorb most of its costs during the development and piloting stages with financial support from philanthropic support. However, once established, the maintenance of the networks will transition to a local cooperative model, which will be moderated by a lead organization in the targeted area with continued probono scaffolding from DHDI and partners through the first 3 years. ClimateCivix will be maintained as an open-access resource to grassroots networks, while data and data analysis will be monetized with global organizations.