FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Dilly Severin | dseverin@data2x.org
The Data2X Board is pleased to introduce Krista Jones Baptista as the new executive director of Data2X. Baptista is an accomplished leader with a track record of leveraging digital technology to improve people’s lives. She previously served as the global director of the Center for Digital Acceleration at DAI where she led the Center’s strategy and oversaw a portfolio of global digital programs including the USAID funded Digital Frontiers Project. She also held a series of positions at DAI over nearly two decades, growing and leading their digital and data practice. Digital inclusion and data have been at the heart of her work throughout her career. Prior to her tenure at DAI, Baptista was a management consultant, and she continues to serve as an adjunct professor at the John’s Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies on innovations in digital development.
Throughout its history, Data2X has illuminated gender data gaps and worked in partnership to establish gender data as a development priority critical to accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. The organization is celebrating a decade of impact this year under the theme of “A Decade of Progress, A Future of Action.”
“I am delighted to welcome Krista to lead Data2X into a new chapter at a time when the potential of gender data to transform the lives of women and girls in all their diversity is greater than ever,” says Elizabeth Cousens, president and CEO of the United Nations Foundation and Data2X board chair. “Thanks to insights afforded by gender data—including digital data—we now better understand the gendered impacts of crises from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change to conflict. I am confident that under Krista’s leadership Data2X will help build a movement to place gender data at the center of policies that build resilience and respond to the needs of the most vulnerable.”
“I am honored to join Data2X at such a pivotal moment in the organization’s history,” says Baptista. “I am especially excited to use Data2X’s signature brand of convening and collaboration to forge new paths that leverage existing and emerging forms of gender data to drive greater equity and economic prosperity for all.”
Baptista will officially begin her role on September 28, 2022.
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About Data2X
Data2X is a civil society organization and gender data alliance working to improve the production and use of gender data through strategic partnerships, research, advocacy, and communications.