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OUR WORK

2021 Girls’ Education Roadmap

CLIENT
Population Council
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BACK TO ALL WORK
Background + Challenge

The Girls’ Education Roadmap is a first-of-its-kind report forging a shared pathway for the global girls’ education community to follow in their common goal: ensuring that every girl has access to a quality education. Despite billions of dollars invested in girls’ education advocacy, and policy solutions, even before COVID-19, girls were out of school and not gaining basic skills. Effective solutions are needed now and this report outlines a pathway for policymakers, NGOs, advocates, donors, and researchers to drive better education results around the world.

 

This project was lead by the Population Council’s GIRL Center (Population Council’s Girl Innovation, Research, and Learning Center) to highlight findings from the Evidence for Gender Education Resource (EGER) project. EGER is an interactive online database that provides insight on the current state of global girls’ education programming, while also highlighting and synthesizing the latest evidence from the gender and education field. EGER is supported by Echidna Giving, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). The deliverable was an 80+ page report that distilled key insights from EGER and highlighted gaps in current work on global girls’ education to help guide evidence-based investments. This report reviewed thousands of studies, and hundreds of programs working across dozens of countries to figure out who’s doing what, what’s working where, and what are the biggest needs facing girls.

 

Because of the scale of the project, the client asked us first for a visual infographic to present the “Key Takeaways.” This evolved into an executive summary-style version of the report and helped organize and structure our work on the full report as we established a visual system of color, typography, iconography, infographic styles, and photography.

 

This sizable project called upon our strategic thinking, conceptualizing and planning skills as much as our design expertise.

The report had 4 primary goals:

  • To support policymakers, NGOs, advocates, donors, and researchers investing in what works to improve girls’ education outcomes
  • To make sure researchers are focusing on answering the most urgent and important questions in the field
  • To bring together accurate findings from many different evidence sources and gender and education programs in one place
  • To present those findings, which include massive amounts of data, in easily understood, visually engaging ways
Services
Services
Services Provided
Data Visualizations
Infographics
Print Collateral
Reports
See the report here.
Approach 

Working extremely closely with the Population Council’s EGER team, we tackled the project in sections, using weekly intensive all-team reviews and brainstorming sessions, evolving those team decisions as we worked, then weaving them in along the way. We connected early and often to ensure all stakeholders were aligned with the visuals so that they perfectly reflected the research and/or the core idea being communicated.

With so much information to present and the importance of creating a consistent narrative across the report, we developed two important visual elements to use throughout the report. Both help to orient the reader in the section and layer on data or shift focus.

The first of these critical visuals represents the three bodies of data that are essential to the roadmap’s success: Needs, Practice, and Evidence. These had to be clearly shown to highlight alignments and misalignments. The second key visual shows the perceived barriers to education for girls, structured with three distinct categories: barriers that equally affect girls and boys, barriers more pronounced for girls, and barriers specific only to girls.

For data-driven charts and graphs, we started with the raw data provided and used Tableau, then styled them to ensure all data visualizations integrated seamlessly into the visual system and overarching design of the report to create a cohesive whole from disparate sources.

This concise, informative, and accessible report was launched in late February, 2021 in time for International Women’s Day in March of 2021.

“Our researchers worked hard to synthesize data from hundreds of studies, programs, and data sources, but we needed creative solutions to share our many insights in a clear and meaningful way. Owl’s Head Solutions took the time to truly understand the complex story our data was telling and created engaging, clear, and insightful visuals to make this information accessible to our audience. Through their collaboration and creativity, we are able to clearly share our findings with those who have the power to make real change in girls’ education.”

—Meredith Kozak, Project Manager for the Evidence for Gender and Education Resource (EGER) project
Impact

The EGER team at the Population Council were supremely pleased with the resulting report, impressed with our skill at corralling all the disparate source material into a report that was easy to read and visually cohesive…and within an extremely challenging timeline. Since its launch in late February, this report and corresponding summary document has been downloaded over 700 times.

Filed Under: Case Study, Featured