Online – September 29, 2026. In the rural part of Tanzania, a woman works in an agricultural chain selling her crops to cooperatives on a monthly basis. Those transaction records are not digital, and therefore are invisible to traditional banks. If financial institutions’ scoring models were different, this would unlock formal credit and enable women like her to expand their farms, secure their families’ future and power the growth of their communities.
Gender is a critical variable that informs institutional decision-making, whether that is explicit or not. It can also be a key lens for public policies aiming to reduce structural inequalities and produce real impact in millions of lives. Broadly speaking, gender data refers to data that is collected and analyzed to reflect the different conditions and economic realities of women and men. How institutions capture and use this data directly dictates which populations financial service providers serve, which citizens public policies protect, and where development resources flow.
However, it is often the case that this data is not even captured or made available for analysis in the first place. What if there was a way to make the invisible visible?
The Datasphere Initiative and the Alliance for Innovative Regulation (AIR) hosted a webinar to tackle this challenge: how unlocking gender data can create pathways for meaningful policymaking, reduce inequalities, and drive inclusive development.
Tools for unlocking datasets: What makes operational sandboxes unique?
Opening the roundtable, Morine Amutorine (Africa Sandboxes Forum Lead, Datasphere Initiative) explored how operational sandboxes can unlock datasets for policymaking.
“Operational sandboxes are environments that provide access to data, software, and infrastructure to enable the testing, validation, and improvement of standards or technical aspects of products, services, or processes, under real or simulated conditions.”
According to Amutorine, operational sandboxes serve as infrastructures that provide secure access to datasets, able to transcend case-by-case negotiations with reusable governance patterns and tested safeguards. Drawing from the examples of the UK’s Health Data Research and Africa’s Ecobank, she noted that what makes operational sandboxes unique is their ability to provide to innovators clear guidance on priority challenges, product compatibility requirements, and interoperability standards.
Sulita Levaux (Program Manager, AIR) presented key insights from the “Harnessing Gender Data for Inclusive Regulation” program. She detailed how collaborative design sprints bring together regulators, financial institutions, and innovators to move gender-disaggregated data from basic collection into actionable policy decisions and inclusive market solutions. Her insights drew directly from AIR’s work with central banks across the continent – including the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Bank of Tanzania – where collaborative sprints produced concrete prototypes, like gender intelligence hubs and standardized reporting frameworks.
A call for a fundamental mindset change: moving beyond binary sex disaggregation
Moderated by Nitya Malladi (Program Manager, AIR), the webinar’s panel discussion brought together Bonnita Nyamwire (Director of Research, Pollicy) and Sophie Mills (Gender Lead, FSD Network). The session focused on why collecting gender-disaggregated data (GDD) is only the starting point for unlocking gender data towards an impactful change.
“The challenge is not simply whether gender-disaggregated data exists. We also need to ask important questions like whether this data captures people’s different realities, whether it reaches the people who need it the most, and also, importantly, whether institutions can use it to make better decisions.”
Bonnita Nyamwire emphasized that gender data is not simply data about women but data that reveals how gender power and other structural inequalities shape people’s experiences, opportunities and outcomes. She stressed that effective gender statistics must go beyond binary counting to incorporate intersecting factors such as age, disability, location, education, and economic status.
Crucially, Nyamwire pointed out that the data pipeline often breaks down at the very beginning: during tool design and survey planning. If collection tools are designed incorrectly without gender sensitivity or intersectional variables from the outset, meaningful disaggregation becomes impossible down the line.
“Gender-disaggregated data goes beyond the sex disaggregation of men and women and interacts with different intersecting identities. The concept of intersectionality in gender data is very important. For example, disability, age, economic status, geography, location, ethnicity, education, sexuality, and other forms of inequality.”
Sophie Mills, drawing on experiences from the Central Bank of Rwanda, highlighted the importance of understanding regulatory incentives to establish women’s financial inclusion as a target. When women’s financial inclusion is established as a national priority, central banks and financial institutions gain a clear mandate to require and collect gender-disaggregated data.
Mills also noted that, in the financial sector, much of the data relevant to women’s economic lives remains un-digitized, and therefore invisible. Capturing non-digital transactions, such as informal savings and paper cooperative sales, is essential to feed into alternative scoring models and de-risk certain categories of women in financial institutions.
A key takeaway from the session, stressed by both Nyamwire and Mills, is that data itself cannot drive real-world impact without a fundamental change in mindset around the broader societal norms shaping policymaking, spanning from initial data planning all the way through policy implementation.
“Another thing that I would flag is the role of gender norms. You can have the data, the data can be analysed but if there is a sort of normative perception that women or certain segments of women are fundamentally risky, then data itself is not going to change that mindset. It’s part of the tools that we use but we also need to be aware about broader societal norms that there might be.”
The governance hurdle: permission to use data is not the same as an operational pathway to actually use it
Alongside Risper Onyango (Research Associate, Datasphere Initiative), Miranda Barasa (Program Manager, Data Science Program, African Population and Health Research Center, APHRC) led the webinar’s final segment, bringing a health-sector perspective to the conversation. She highlighted major data-sharing bottlenecks across institutions and borders, beginning with paper-based, undigitized records, and the fact that health data is rarely collected through a gender lens, making retrospective disaggregation exceptionally difficult.
Barasa emphasized governance challenges: having the permission to use data is not the same thing as having an operational pathway to actually use it. To make institutions and countries more comfortable sharing data across borders, Barasa pointed out the necessity of trusted frameworks that allow researchers to operate securely.
“Operational sandboxes work very well for us because we have common research questions that we are working on and we are applying advanced AI and machine learning techniques to them. This is now proving more and more to be quite a solution for us.”
Conclusion: We need to make the invisible visible
As a concluding remark, Sulita Levaux noted that closing the gender data gap isn’t just about launching new tech tools, but about getting the foundational governance, internal coordination, and institutional mindsets right. She emphasized the necessity of establishing strong foundations for every data project, urging teams to bring stakeholder coordination across every stage. She also stressed that capacity building and cross-departmental coordination within organizations are crucial to enhance gender-disaggregated data across initiatives.
“Working on gender-disaggregated data is really not a new topic, and the fact that it still brings so much attention means there is still a lot of work to do and also that so many amazing initiatives have been done.”
Summarizing the session’s core takeaways, Lorrayne Porciuncula (Executive Director, Datasphere Initiative) reminded participants that progress often begins with simple, foundational steps rather than complex technological solutions. Before deploying advanced AI models, institutions must address basic data groundwork: creating operational manuals, standardized templates, and ensuring data is digital and machine-readable.
Porciuncula emphasized that sandboxes are ultimately about bringing stakeholders together to experience new ways of working and drive a change in long-standing mindsets. She also highlighted the crucial role of civil society in sandboxing, stressing that the work in Datasphere Initiative is to make visible the role of civil society in spaces that inform new generations of sandboxes. That is why the Datasphere Initiative continues to document good practices of sandboxing and building a global community.
“We need to make the invisible visible. And that is what gender-disaggregated data does. It brings up stories and perspectives that are not always visible for regulators, making it very palpable.”
Why this matters
Unlocking gender data across Africa requires moving beyond isolated datasets to build interconnected, governed ecosystems. By pairing operational sandboxes with intersectional survey design and civil society participation, policymakers can turn invisible paper transactions into actionable, inclusive development.
Explore the Africa Sandboxes Forum and meet the different initiatives to promote innovative regulation across the continent.
About the hosts
The Datasphere Initiative is a global think-and-do-tank shaping the future of data governance by connecting policymakers, innovators, researchers, and civil society to co-create solutions for responsible data use.
The Alliance for Innovative Regulation is a nonprofit, non-membership organization working to make the financial system fully inclusive, fair and resilient through responsible use of new technology.
