Many Health Centers But Limited Access
In the city of Buenos Aires there are over 40 centers offering sexual and reproductive health services.
Buenos Aires has an extensive network of decentralized preventive healthcare practices and community care centers. Decentralized care strategies reduce gaps in access to services, so it is important for citizens to know the nearby establishments. They help achieve more equitable access to health resources such as contraceptives and HIV tests.
In Buenos Aires, sexual and reproductive rights are guaranteed by law. Health centers have teams of professionals and supplies to guarantee these rights, yet many people are unaware of them. This prevents people from accessing them for free.
To change this, Buenos Aires updated and improved data concerning condom delivery points, contraceptive methods distributed by city government, and places that offer sexual and reproductive health services throughout the city. That’s when Fundación Huesped, a nonprofit focused on guaranteeing the right to health and disease control, got involved. Fundación Huesped used data to optimize Dónde, a digital platform that makes it easier for the citizens to find where to go to get condoms, contraceptives and HIV tests, access to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, and vaccination.
Along with this, the City of Buenos Aires developed new data visualizations with this information and added the datasets concerning vaccination centers to the City’s data platform.
Building up Dónde to Direct People to Sexual Health Services
Through Buenos Aires’ 2017 OGP action plan, the government committed to collaborating on the transparent provision of contraceptive methods and to guarantee access to sexual and reproductive health for the entire population. Though Dónde was established prior to this, it was used as a means through which to fulfill the goals of the commitment. The platform was expanded to include more information and guidance on how to access different types of services and the existing data was updated.
The City of Buenos Aires developed a dataset with the location of every sexual and reproductive health center as well as condom distribution points in the City. The dataset was regularly updated and displayed in the government’s website. Dónde was accessed by a thousand users every week.
Dónde continues to grow, expanding its reach to other districts and the open data policy is an example to follow that favors the joint work of the government and civil society to think of new ways of accessing sexual and reproductive rights.
Buenos Aires continues to build on these reforms in its OGP action plans. In its 2018-2020 OGP action plan, they worked to further comprehensive sexual education in and around the city (particularly targeting the youth). The current action plan includes a commitment to open up data on access to rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.
