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COVID-19 and gender-based violence: reflections from a “data for development” project on the Colombia–Venezuela border

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare socioeconomic inequalities and injustices that ran deep long before the virus spread its way across the globe: from racial inequity in high-income countries such as the United States (US) (APM Research Lab 2021), to grievously under-resourced nursing homes staffed by mainly female and often immigrant care workers (Das Gupta 2020), to lack of access to water for hand washing in overcrowded urban slums and refugee camps (Mihara and Root 2020). Among these injustices, long-standing but at once thrust into the global spotlight, is the “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence (GBV), reports of which have soared following the imposition of “stay-at-home” orders worldwide (Mlambo-Ngcuka 2020). Women’s exposure to violence while confined in the home is an unintended but clear consequence of otherwise well-intentioned public health orders meant to curb the spread of the virus, implemented within a global context in which GBV is commonplace. We observed the spread of this shadow pandemic through the glossy screen of a Google Pixel 4 mobile phone, in our capacity as developers of a “data for development” intervention called Cosas de Mujeres (Women’s Stuff). Cosas de Mujeres is a WhatsAppbased digital platform that addresses GBV in the context of the Venezuelan mass migration to and through Colombia. The intervention has two functions: first, to provide women with information about where they can access services that prevent and respond to GBV, and second, to generate data that can be used to inform more effective and gender-responsive programming and service delivery at what is often referred to as the “humanitarian–development nexus” (see Hinds 2015). Cosas de Mujeres is