IMAPI | Early Childhood Friendly Municipal Index by Odd.studio

The first thousand days of a child are the most important to guarantee healthy development. IMAPI is a Nurturing Care Municipality Index that combines over 100 metrics that are strongly related to environmental development in these first days of a child’s life. The project is an 18-month effort from a diverse group of professionals to put together databases from 2015 and 2016 from all 5.570 municipalities in Brazil, to create a sound, peer-reviewed methodology, and to make the results publicly available.

And by diverse, we mean that all metrics, sources, domains, and details that describe the Index were selected and reviewed by a committee of experts in the fields of public health, applied by a team of data scientists, and validated by a group of epidemiologists and government stakeholders, and made visual and accessible by a team of information, data, graphic, and interface designers, and data strategists.

One grand Index ranks all municipalities, and 5 domains (health, early learning, responsive care, nutrition, and safety and protection) composed by 31 variables, characterize the strengths and weaknesses of every one of all 5600 Brazilian cities.

The Brazilian coffee flower inspired the visual metaphor chosen for the main visualization - it's something delicate that needs nourishing but that also has a strong history of comfort, family, and care. Each petal indicates a domain's value, making it possible to quickly understand whether it is a strong suit of that municipality or if it needs further attention, investment, or care.

It is a one-of-a-kind project in Latin America, designed by specialists, meant to support better decision-making for health officials and mayors, as well as to allow a better comprehension of a city’s public investments in early childhood development. To that end, the project focused on developing an open access web platform. And, understanding that it takes more than just beautifully crafted visualizations and UX to incorporate the usage of data in a culture, there's a full section dedicated to advocacy.

The web platform was developed to be interactive, intuitive, and simple to navigate and understand. It allows a high-level view of the Index, comparisons between states and cities, and also a deep dive into one particular city, domain, or indicator of interest. It is an open database and open method project, allowing researchers and policy-makers to continue the work, analyzing the specifics and complexities of their region.

IMAPI is an incredible collaboration between academics, data scientists, and epidemiologists, with support from the Ministry of Health and official health organizations in Brazil, and was made accessible by the innovative design from two data and information design companies. It tackles not only early childhood development, an ongoing and important issue worldwide but also allows real data transparency by delivering information to the general public through simple, easy-to-understand, interactive data visualizations.

More than just an Index, it is a social tool and framework for government decision-making based on data that can inspire other governments and cities to implement similar measurements of great national impact.