OPEN

Our Portal for Equality and Navigation. Visualizing gender and social disparities with real data, country by country.

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Inspiration

When I started this hackathon, I was looking for a way to take direct action on SDGs 5 (Gender Equality) and 10 (Reduced Inequalities). I quickly realized how hard it is to find accessible, relevant data tied to these goals. Most of it is buried in spreadsheets or scattered across sites. I wanted to create something that made it easy for anyone to explore these issues without needing to process raw data themselves. So I built a platform that brings all this information together in one visual, interactive place—no more digging through tables just to understand what’s going on. People are empowered to enact change with access to this data.

What it does

The website displays a zoomable world map. When you hover over a country, its name appears, and clicking reveals a sidebar with all available data for that country. You can explore direct indicators of gender inequality and broader statistics across categories like jobs, education, health, and finance. The goal is to help users easily spot where gaps exist—and where action is most needed. The website allows a heatmap to be rendered for specific metrics too, allowing people to see how countries compare to each other in certain areas, and finding where disparities lie.

How I built it

While the final product is a website, most of the work was behind the scenes. I scraped and processed large amounts of data, mostly from the World Bank. I built scripts to clean and restructure the data into JSON format, making sure the most recent and reliable values were used. This involved a lot of trial-and-error, eye-checking patterns, and figuring out how to align indicators that don’t always follow the same structure.

Challenges I ran into

The first challenge was just finding the data. Even major sources like the World Bank don’t make it easy to access in bulk. I also had almost no experience with web design or UI/UX going into this. I had to learn how to use Vite, deploy on Vercel, and build an interactive map using Leaflet. Making the map infinitely scrollable and responsive was especially tricky. Generating the heat map was also hard as it ended up requiring me to reprocess all the data and learn how to normalize for a given set of values.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Getting the map to scroll infinitely while keeping it interactive was a huge technical win. From a programming perspective, re-rendering the map layers cleanly while maintaining performance was not easy. I’m also proud of the site’s usability—the data is clear, filterable, and visually organized in a way that invites exploration instead of overwhelming users. Another feat was processing vast expanses of data entirely by myself, not even using AI to create scripts. I spent hours scanning data and analyzing patterns myself, and creating extraction algorithms to format data in a more efficient, compact, and readable way.

What I learned

Even when data is technically “public,” it’s often hard to actually use. Scraping, cleaning, and transforming it takes far more work than expected. I also learned that presenting data in a meaningful way is just as important as collecting it in the first place.

What's next for OPEN

One of the next features I’m planning is allowing my processed versions of indicators to be downloaded. There's also room to add more filters, comparisons between countries, and better mobile responsiveness.

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