EcoEquity platform developed by graduate students from the Department of Data Science at Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SeoulTech) 

Today’s development challenges rarely occur in isolation. Climate shocks, inequality, and economic vulnerability often overlap, affecting communities in interconnected ways. As these pressures grow, development cooperation must find better ways to align priorities and ensure that resources are used as effectively as possible.

Two priorities stand out: gender equality and climate action. Both are central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet the point where they meet is often difficult to see in practice.

This challenge inspired EcoEquity, a platform developed by graduate students from the Department of Data Science at Seoul National University of Science and Technology during the 2025 UNDP Data Dive for Development Hackathon. Built by Jostin Jerico Rosal, Juliet Ondisi and Hayatullah Hassanpour, the platform uses data science to make gender-climate integration more visible within Official Development Assistance (ODA) data.

The EcoEquity landing page: An intuitive entry point to explore the intersection of gender and climate funding

“Whilst researching for the hackathon, we kept coming across gender equality and climate action discussed together in global policy spaces, but when we looked at the data, this connection was not always easy to see,” said Jostin Jerico Rosal, one of the team members. “EcoEquity grew from that curiosity. We wanted to uncover where these priorities meet, where they remain separate, and how data can help point toward more integrated and inclusive development strategies.”

The "integration gap" in data

While the international community recognizes that gender and climate are linked, tracking this integration in project portfolios remains challenging. Often, these priorities are recorded through separate markers or scattered across project descriptions.

The majority of tagged projects focus solely on gender, with very few achieving full gender-climate integration.

EcoEquity changes this by surfacing how these priorities intersect. Analysis of gender and climate markers from the OECD Creditor Reporting System revealed a striking imbalance:

• Mainstreamed gender: 64 percent of analyzed projects focused on gender equality.
• Climate focus: Only 14 percent focused on climate resilience.
• The overlap: Just 17 percent of projects carried both markers.

What the data shows

Over the last decade, the share of projects that bring gender and climate together has increased, suggesting a subtle shift towards integration. Yet the progress has been inconsistent. The overall portfolio continues to lean much more heavily toward projects that are primarily gender-focused, meaning that integration is becoming more visible without yet becoming the norm.

Projects that combine gender and climate priorities are increasing, but remain a minority within the broader portfolio.

The same unevenness appears when the data is broken down further. Some sectors, especially agriculture, forestry and fishing, appear to be moving further ahead in combining gender and climate priorities within the same project. Others, including education and governance and civil society, remain much more concentrated in single-focus approaches.

Integration is not happening evenly across sectors, with stronger alignment visible in some areas than others.

The donor's perspective offers a slightly more encouraging picture. Many donors fall into a more balanced category, meaning their portfolios reflect both gender and climate priorities rather than just one. Even so, some donors still lean more strongly toward either gender-focused or climate-focused support. This suggests that integrated financing is gaining ground, but has not yet become the standard across all donor portfolios.

The donor landscape offers a more encouraging picture, with many donors reflecting a more balanced portfolio mix of gender and climate priorities.

On the recipient side, funding remains concentrated among a relatively small group of countries. A significant portion is also categorized as ‘bilateral, unspecified’, suggesting that some support remains untied to specific local contexts in official reporting. Across most recipient countries, gender-only funding continues to outweigh climate-only and fully integrated support.

At the recipient level, funding remains unevenly distributed, and gender-only support still outweighs fully integrated projects in many contexts.

Together, these patterns tell a consistent story. Integration is beginning to take shape, but it is not yet the norm across sectors, donors or recipient contexts.

From data to decision-making

The platform translates complex development data into intuitive dashboards and searchable project-level information. It is organized into several perspective views, each designed to answer a different type of question about gender-climate development.  

The Strategic Dashboard provides a high-level overview of funding patterns, while the overviews of donors, sectors, and recipients offer focused insights on funders, thematic areas, and recipient countries. The Projects Database allows users to search across more than 700,000 project records using page-specific filters such as donor, recipient, sector, integration type, and year range.

EcoEquity’s interactive dashboards allow users to examine tagged projects from multiple perspectives, making it easier to identify funding patterns, integration gaps, and regional coverage.

For example, on the Projects Database page, users can search for a specific project by title or description, and filter projects by time period, recipient country, sector, or integration type. This allows them to identify which projects contribute to specific gender-climate funding patterns and move beyond summary figures to examine the project-level evidence behind the dashboard insights.

The projects database page filtered to show projects with the words ‘climate’ and ‘gender’ in the project title or project description.

Rather than leaving integration buried inside large datasets, EcoEquity helps policymakers and related stakeholders see exactly where resources are aligned and where gaps and opportunities exist.

Why this matters now

As development cooperation becomes more complex, data-driven tools help us work smarter. One of the clearest lessons from this project is that reporting and reality do not always align. Official markers are a useful starting point, but they only tell half of the story.

By bringing data, technology and development expertise together, the platform helps make complex information more visible and more usable. In a development landscape where gender equality and climate resilience can no longer be treated separately, wider use of integrated data approaches can help institutions uncover hidden connections, strengthen coordination, and support more informed development decisions.

This blog article was written by Jostin Jerico Rosal, Juliet Ondisi and Hayatullah Hassanpour.

This article represents the views of the authors and does not reflect the views of UNDP.

About the United Nations Development Programme

UNDP is the leading United Nations organization fighting to end the injustice of poverty, inequality, and climate change. Working with our broad network of experts and partners in 170 countries, we help nations to build integrated, lasting solutions for people and planet. Learn more at undp.org or follow at @UNDP.

About UNDP Seoul Policy Centre

UNDP Seoul Policy Centre is a facilitator of innovative development cooperation to catalyse the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Through its SDG Partnerships programme and other South-South and Triangular Cooperation initiatives, the Centre supports countries by sharing innovative, tested-and-proven practices and policy tools on strategic development issues globally. Learn more at undp.org/policy-centre/seoul or follow at @UNDPSPC.

2025 Data Dive for Development Hackathon

The Data Dive for Development Hackathon was an initiative led by the UNDP Seoul Policy Centre from July to November 2025, inviting young professionals to develop functional prototypes that extract, analyze and visualize insights from Official Development Assitance (ODA) data. Learn more at https://www.undp.org/policy-centre/seoul/events/data-dive-development-hackathon-2025.

Prototypes developed under the hackathon are currently not widely available to the public. For any inquiries and access requests, please contact info.kr@undp.org.