28 BOX K The Township GIS Tool Since 2017, Hlaingtharyar, Hpa An, and Taunggyi Township authorities and local residents have been working with development partners Thibi and The Asia Foundation to identify priority community-safety issues. The process of identifying issues through local-level engagement and dialogue, and collaboration between multiple government partners, led to the development of the Township GIS Tool (TGIST), a simple mapping tool to capture, analyze, and present data spatially. The tool gives authorities a way to easily visualize and analyze their data. Unlike other information systems separately developed by different ministries, TGIST is not a repository of data that feeds back to the Union level. Instead, local authorities can jointly identify what kinds of data they need to solve a problem, upload just those datasets, and share them with other departments. As data from different local authorities is added and shared in the tool, it is possible to visualize different layers of information simultaneously—both the locations of streetlights and the sites of traffic collisions, for instance. The tool can be used to quickly identify priority areas for response, such as hotspots for traffic collisions or high-crime areas, while also visually demonstrating the value of administrative data-collection efforts and the linkages between them. As the database has expanded, different levels of government have convened to discuss additional community issues, including drug prevention and tackling gender inequality. The success of TGIST has encouraged local authorities to improve the quality of their data—for instance, by disaggregating by age and sex. The TGIST project has also increased community participation by validating data from both “formal” and “informal” residents. Local governments have no budget for services to unregistered, “informal” residents. As a result, shared services like garbage collection, water, and transport are overstretched, causing tensions between the two communities. A partnership between Yangon-based civil society organization Women for the World and local ward administrators to conduct “local-level safety audits” has brought together formal and informal residents to reach a shared understanding of the problems they face as a community. The data from these audits, fed into the TGIST database, helps local authorities understand the missing voices of communities and the valuable contribution they can make to collective problem solving. The project has produced a shift, albeit slight, to local governments providing services to informal as well as formal residents. In Hlaingtharyar Township, the local authorities have made garbage collection available in informal settlements.