HOW CAN DATA IMPROVE PUBLIC POLICIES?

At RIL we believe that inspiration is essential to generate innovative, efficient public policies that have an impact on people's quality of life.

In this newsletter we share ideas on how cities are working with data to improve the services provided to citizens. Creating public policies based on evidence is a great opportunity to make responses to public problems more effective; To inspire you to follow this path, we selected 4 initiatives from very diverse management fields, which reminds us that there are truly no limits when it comes to the application of data to improve local policies. The data available to local governments allows them to react in time, respond according to the dimension of the problems detected and are essential to move towards more transparent procedures.

With these initiatives we seek to make visible public policies that tend to improve the lives of those who live in cities.

Water crisis: how data drove behavior change

Cape Town, South Africa

Inhabitants: 4,618,000

Cape Town faced the worst drought in more than 300 years and to solve it, it implemented an innovative strategy in order to change the behavior of citizens around water consumption. What did they do? They collected information on public opinion in real time, and detected that there were rumors regarding the cause of the water shortages that did not reflect what was really happening in the city, for example, the neighbors maintained that the municipal buildings were wasting most of the water.

To modify the erroneous perception, they designed a communication strategy focused on informing the public, specifically focused on the areas and perceptions that needed to be modified, seeking to promote behavioral changes with the greatest impact on water consumption, for example, the irrigation of parks and gardens. .

Thanks to continuous monitoring of water consumption, they were able to verify that the campaigns implemented taking this data as input were effective in reducing water consumption by more than 50% in just three years.

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