Empowering Climate Accountability with Visual Storytelling

How Ona and UNICEF built NDCs for Every Child: A Digital Platform for Climate Accountability

The climate crisis is fundamentally a child rights crisis. Today, approximately one billion children or nearly half of the world's children, live in extremely high-risk countries, exposed to severe climate and environmental hazards, shocks, and stresses. Despite bearing the disproportionate burden of these impacts, children and young people are consistently marginalised in critical climate policymaking. Astonishingly, only 2.4 per cent of key multilateral climate funds are directed towards child-responsive programmes.

To address this gap, governments must prioritise children in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the foundational climate action plans submitted by countries under the Paris Agreement. Recognising this urgent need, UNICEF's Climate, Environment, Energy and Disaster Risk Reduction (CEED) team embarked on a global evaluation of NDCs to determine their "child sensitivity".

However, evaluating policy is only half the battle; transparency and accessible data are required to drive true accountability. To maximise this accountability and empower policymakers, advocates, and citizens, UNICEF partnered with Ona to design and deploy "NDCs for Every Child," a dynamic, public-facing data platform.

This post delves into Ona's critical technical role in transforming a complex, spreadsheet-based evaluation process into an interactive global dashboard that is actively driving the push for the next generation of climate policies.

The Challenge: Moving Beyond the Spreadsheet

Initially, the NDC4C (NDC for Children) project was managed through an internal, manual Excel sheet used to track how countries were updating their NDCs over time. While this was a starting point, it was highly unsustainable for tracking global progress.

A static spreadsheet cannot provide visibility to the public, nor can it allow a country to easily compare its child-sensitive climate policies against its regional peers or countries with similar GDPs and demographic profiles. UNICEF needed a scalable solution that could visually track the evolution of NDC submissions, evaluate child welfare impacts across dozens of indicators, and classify countries into clear performance categories (Category A, B, or C).

The goal was not to shame nations that were lagging, but to encourage improvement through public visibility and peer comparison.

The Technical Blueprint: From Data Collection to Visualisation

To bring the "NDCs for Every Child" platform to life, Ona leveraged its suite of data management and visualisation technologies, stretching their capabilities to meet the unique demands of global climate data. The system architecture was built on three core pillars:

1. Data Collection via InForm (Ona Data): The evaluation of the NDC documents required a robust data collection mechanism. Ona transitioned the project from Excel to InForm, a UNICEF-customised version of the ODK-based Ona Data platform. InForm allowed multiple member states to submit data, links, and documents offline and across various facets of child-sensitive policy. The original spreadsheet was expanded into specialised forms covering 52 distinct indicators across 9 critical social sectors (such as health, education, WASH, and social protection).
2. Complex Data Modelling with dbt: The data modelling for the dashboard was highly intensive. The raw data coming from InForm largely consisted of "yes/no" responses corresponding to 52 specific indicators. Ona utilised dbt (data build tool) to engineer the analytics, transforming these binary responses into holistic child-sensitivity classifications. This process was exceptionally complex because certain indicators belonged to multiple categories simultaneously; for instance, an education indicator might count toward both "Multisectoral Commitments" and "Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE)". Furthermore, Ona had to duplicate the entire codebase and analysis to support a fully translated Spanish dashboard, ensuring that hovering over a chart in the Spanish version provided accurate, translated outputs from a dedicated data table.
3. No-Code Visualisation via Akuko: The front-end platform was created and maintained entirely by Akuko, Ona's powerful data visualisation tool. Akuko provided a no-code experience for platform maintainers, allowing UNICEF to host the site on their own domain while delivering the premium look and feel of a custom-engineered website.

Overcoming Mapping Challenges: Making Every Nation Visible

One of the most significant technical achievements of the project was the interactive mapping. In global climate policy, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like Vanuatu, Fiji, and Micronesia are highly vulnerable to climate change, yet they are geographically tiny.

If a user zoomed out to see the whole world, these critical island nations would vanish. If they zoomed in to see the islands, the rest of the world was lost. To solve this, Ona implemented significant infrastructure upgrades to Akuko, utilising Mapbox and QGIS to create a seamless three-tier mapping experience:

1. The Global Centroid Map: On the main global dashboard, small island nations were represented as circular dots (centroids). This ensured that even the smallest nations were visible at a global glance. Hovering over or clicking a dot revealed the country's specific NDC data.
2. The Interactive Spinning Globe: The second view maintained the centroids but added dynamic interactivity. When a user searched for a specific island nation, the map would automatically "fly" (spinning the globe) and zoom to the region.
3. The Country Bounds Map: The third view allowed users to zoom directly into the actual geographic bounds of a single country, replacing the centroid dot with the accurate shapes of the islands, such as the six islands of Kiribati or the seven of Micronesia.

Navigating Geopolitical Complexities: Ona also had to ensure the maps reflected UNICEF's official geopolitical standards. A custom lookup table mapping ISO3 country codes was built to reconcile standard map names with UNICEF-recognised names (e.g., changing "Tanzania" to "United Republic of Tanzania"). Furthermore, for contested borders, Ona engineers used QGIS to merge UNICEF-provided shapefiles with existing GeoJSON files, dynamically rendering contested boundaries as dotted or broken lines so that the platform remained geopolitically neutral and accurate.

The Impact: Driving the Push for NDC 3.0

The "NDCs for Every Child" platform analyses country submissions against four key criteria to determine child sensitivity: Holistic and multisectoral commitments, explicit references to youth, Rights-based approaches, and Inclusive stakeholder engagement.

The public visibility created by Ona's dashboards has had a tangible impact on global climate diplomacy. By allowing countries to easily compare their climate policies with their peers, the platform is actively encouraging the transition from first- and second-generation NDCs to the highly ambitious Third Generation NDCs (NDC 3.0).

As countries prepare their NDCs 3.0 for 2025 submission, the platform tracks this rapid evolution, highlighting which nations have successfully upgraded their targets to include child-sensitive adaptation measures in health, education, and social protection.

Beyond the public-facing platform, Ona also built an internal, non-public tool for UNICEF's climate team. This internal dashboard automated the manual analysis of criteria scores between the second and third generations of NDCs, eliminating the need for tedious spreadsheet updates and dramatically simplifying day-to-day reporting for UNICEF project managers.

Conclusion: A Foundation for the Future

The decisions made today regarding climate adaptation and mitigation will define the world that children will inherit. Empowering young people to engage in climate action and ensuring policies address their unique vulnerabilities is not just a moral imperative; it is a necessity for a sustainable future.

Through technical ingenuity, complex data modelling, and cutting-edge visualisation, Ona has provided UNICEF with a powerful advocacy tool. As Sean Storr from UNICEF HQ's CEED team noted:

"Ona's technical expertise, responsiveness, and flexibility were essential to developing this critical tool, which is being used to advocate for greater inclusion and representation of children and young people in key climate policies around the world."

As the world gears up for the next wave of NDC submissions, the "NDCs for Every Child" platform stands as a testament to how technology and data can be harnessed to hold governments accountable, spur policy innovation, and ensure that the voices and rights of children remain at the very heart of the global climate agenda.