VizChitra 2026 | Talks
14:30 - 14:45 ⋅ Afternoon
Bangalore International Centre
National statistical offices produce mountains of data that rarely reach the people making decisions. This talk shares an unconventional method for changing that: asking government officials to build data stories from whatever is in their bag.
Sneha Kaul
Statistics Analyst·UN Women Asia-Pacific
Data only gains value when it is used. That sounds obvious. In practice, it almost never happens by default.
National Statistical Offices across Asia and the Pacific produce enormous volumes of data. The assumption is that dissemination leads to uptake, and uptake leads to impact. Sneha's work has shown that this chain breaks down almost immediately, long before data reaches a policy decision.
To understand why, she asks government officials a simple question: what's in your bag? Participants pull out currency notes, house keys, umbrellas, whatever they happen to be carrying, and use those objects to construct data stories. The exercise is deliberately low-stakes and physical. It reveals something fundamental: data does not communicate itself. Meaning is built by the people in the system, shaped by context, institutional culture, and whether anyone ever made evidence feel accessible in the first place.
This talk draws on that work to explore what it actually takes to shift institutional appetite for evidence. Not better dashboards or longer reports, but a different understanding of how meaning travels through a system and who is responsible for carrying it.
You will leave with a clearer picture of how national statistical systems operate, where the chain from data production to policy action breaks down, and what practitioners, journalists, researchers, and community advocates can do to strengthen it.
Sneha is a Statistics Analyst at UN Women's Asia-Pacific Regional Office in Bangkok, where she supports the global flagship program Women Count. Over seven years across the UN system, she has worked with government statisticians from 40+ national statistical offices on gender statistics and statistical literacy.
Her analytical work brings together survey microdata, geospatial data, and non-traditional sources to produce evidence that gets used. This work has shaped UN flagship publications including the ASEAN Gender Outlook 2022 and 2024 and several gender-environment publications, presented at the UN General Assembly and have informed intergovernmental processes including the climate COPs.
Sneha holds a master's in behavioral science and public policy from the London School of Economics, where she studied how policy design and communication can nudge communities toward better outcomes. That lens shapes how she thinks about data communication, and what makes public data legible, participatory, and actionable.