City: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Reporting to: General Director for Innovation in Integrated Well-Being

The Challenge

Buenos Aires faces a striking divide in early childhood and youth development. Children living in the two southernmost areas of the city experience significantly higher levels of poverty (40 and 46 percent) compared to those in the two northernmost areas (8 and 11 percent). In the south, parents and caregivers have lower levels of educational attainment and higher rates of informal or unstable employment. These socioeconomic gaps are compounded by unequal access to high-quality early childhood services, variations in school attendance and learning conditions, and differences in health, nutrition, and neighborhood safety. These structural divides shape children’s daily experiences and their long-term trajectory for educational attainment, economic mobility, and overall wellbeing.

Closing these gaps is a top priority for Mayor Jorge Macri. The city has implemented several programs aimed at addressing early childhood and youth inequalities. One program, for example, organizes workshops in arts, technology, sports, and career development for nine thousand young people aged thirteen to eighteen in vulnerable communities. The city also runs child development centers for children under the age of three including seventy centers for children in situations of social vulnerability.

The city’s Human Development and Habitat Observatory tracks socioeconomic indicators, including those on early childhood and youth, to inform programs and policies, but city leaders want to step up their use of data even further. They aim to build a data tool that brings together information from multiple government programs and external sources to track north-south inequalities related to early childhood and youth. This Early Childhood and Youth Interactive Dashboard would guide decision-making, strengthen cross-agency collaboration, and enhance the city’s ability to design, target, and scale policies that improve outcomes for the most vulnerable youth.

Key questions include:

• How can data from different programs, sources, and studies be integrated into a coherent, equity-focused framework?
• What indicators best reflect early childhood development, vulnerable neighborhoods, school trajectories, and opportunity gaps?
• What dashboard designs make inequalities visible and action-oriented for policymakers and frontline teams?
• How can the city establish a sustainable, cross-departmental workflow to maintain and update the dashboard?
• What innovation opportunities emerge when child development inequities can be visualized in real time?
• Which neighborhoods should be prioritized for interventions, considering factors such as poverty, infrastructure, educational performance, and care conditions?

What You’ll Do

The fellow will design a prototype of the city’s Early Childhood and Youth Interactive Dashboard. This includes a well-organized map of all relevant data sources, a functional way of visualizing key indicators of inequality, and a practical roadmap for testing, refining, scaling, and sustaining the dashboard across government teams. Secondarily, the fellow would ideally also produce analytical insights to help decision makers interpret inequalities and design more targeted and equitable policies.

To gather data and generate shared criteria for monitoring outcomes, the fellow will engage with a wide range of internal stakeholders, including the city’s Human Development and Habitat Observatory and agencies for Social Innovation; International Relations; Early Childhood, Childhood and Adolescence; Information Systems; Health; and Education. External stakeholders include academic institutions as well as nonprofits and other organizations who may use the dashboard in planning and delivering services. The fellow will also interact with several complementary data analytics efforts underway analyzing school dropout rates, child caregiving, digital wellbeing, and other metrics.

Key deliverables include:

• A data inventory and map of data sources across early childhood, youth, health, education, social services, child development programs, and external datasets.
• An outline and reference guide of core indicators, geographic layers, themes, and user journeys.
• A short diagnostic on gaps and opportunities.
• An early dashboard prototype and a revised prototype based on user testing and feedback from program teams.
• A summary of testing results and recommendations.
• A roadmap for implementing, updating, scaling, and maintaining the dashboard for the future.

What You’ll Bring

The fellow will be expected to possess the following skills:

• Data Analysis
• Policy Analysis
• Social Sciences Perspective
• Data Visualization
• Spanish Language Fluency (preferred)

Apply here

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