Open government means that there is room for the decisions of public authorities to be made collectively, based on the different perspectives of society and transparency about management. But who usually takes part in discussions? Which sections of the population are included in the data used? Which policies are the result of an unrepresentative debate?

These questions guided Natália Paiva, former executive director of Transparência Brasil, in the creation of the Minas de Dados project in 2018, in partnership with data_labe and Preta Lab. Funded by the Organization of American States, the initiative consisted of training black women to occupy these spaces, using technologies and open data in order to democratize the discussion about government decisions and transparency.

To this end, Minas de Dados offered five women a month-longimmersion in topics such as building narratives with open data and issues of civic participation. The meetings included mentoring and activities with black women experts, such as scientist Nina da Hora, and a space for the participants to exchange experiences.

From the program, a breakthrough was born: the final product was the creation of Mulheres Negras Decidem (MND), initially called the Umunna: Mulheres Negras Decidem network, which produces data on politics through the lens of gender, race and class in order to qualify the agenda led by black women and strengthen democracy.

The announcement of the movement, made during the closing of Minas de Dados on March 14, 2018, coincided with the news of the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Pedro Gomes.

According to Tainah Pereira, MND’s political coordinator, it was a catalyzing moment of “forced maturity” that brought concern for the safety of the coordinators and reaffirmed the mission for more black women in institutional politics. “The task of having more of us is necessary because confronting violence is easier when more of us are there [in institutional politics]. At that time, there were still far fewer of us than there are today, and there are few of us,” she said.

She explains that the co-founders saw, through the TB project, the possibility of using data on the low access of black women to health, education and employment policies as a way of emancipating this group and mobilizing public debate. Since then, the movement has expanded into a capillary network that today reaches 19 states, 300 articulators and whose agenda is built collectively.

“Being a political coordinator for Mulheres Negras Decidem is not a position, it’s an identity. The size of the task demands many black women working in different spaces to overcome our under-representation in power and decision-making spaces,” she says.

Pereira points out that the MND has been concerned with the incidence of black women in the political system since its inception. With the expansion of the movement, the role of building, implementing and evaluating public policies that impact black women has been affirmed among its members, in addition to seeing themselves as beneficiaries.

Former TB director Natália Paiva believes that the organization contributed to Mulheres Negras Decidem’s resolve to occupy spaces in institutional politics and is personally proud that the movement is a concrete result of Minas de Dados’ training programme.

For her, the project racialized the discussion promoted by TB about the responsiveness of institutions and their role in reducing inequalities. Paiva believes that the absence of black women in decision-making spaces overlaps with the major problems of inefficiency and quality of public spending, since Brazil’s largest demographic group is under-represented.

Minas de Dados symbolizes Transparência Brasil under her direction, although it came to fruition after her departure. She was the first executive director after 15 years under Cláudio Weber Abramo, who became an advisor to the organization in 2015.

“I’m a black woman taking over an organization that didn’t have this perspective [of a black woman] and, as far as I know, hadn’t had any black people on its board. It was quite disruptive,” she says.

Although it had been working with data from the Legislative Branch for more than a decade, TB had not reflected on how inequality was depicted in these indicators. Under Paiva’s management, the organization began to analyse the data with gender and race markers, and focused on the use of new technologies and the digital space to promote the quality and efficiency of the branches.

The reflection on who analyzes the public data that guides policies, brought by Diana Mendes, co-founder of Mulheres Negras Decidem, complements Paiva’s vision. In a statement about her participation in Minas de Dados, she points out that the absence of black people in these roles results in analyses that disregard racial intersections.

The relevance of the results obtained by Minas de Dados can be translated by the moment of the co-founders’ first meeting with federal deputy Benedita da Silva (PT-RJ), Brazil’s first black senator and former governor of Rio de Janeiro. According to the movement’s coordinator, the congresswoman welcomed them into her office saying she had been waiting for them for 30 years. “In other words: the black women who had the opportunity to study and get an education were now returning to transform reality by influencing the political system,” says Pereira.

She says that the MND’s challenge and objective remain to increase the presence of black people, especially women, not only in decision-making spaces but also in areas of research and public data. The movement has been strengthening partnerships with other institutions to qualify its data production work, because, according to the coordinator, this is in the ‘DNA’ of Mulheres Negras Decidem – a similarity with the organization that drove its creation and has been working, for over 25 years, guided by public data.