Data with Purpose: How Evidence-Informed Policy Can Build Just and Sustainable Cities
“Good data is important — but purpose gives it direction.”
When Andreas Zakhari speaks about cities, he does not begin with spreadsheets or economic models. He begins with people — the families navigating broken infrastructure, the communities underserved by planning decisions made far from where they live, and the persistent gap between what data can reveal and what policy is willing to act on. For Andreas, economics is not an end in itself. It is a lens — and one that, when pointed in the right direction, can illuminate pathways to more just and liveable cities.
A 2024 Menzies Global Voices Fellow, Andreas brought this conviction to one of the most consequential economic gatherings in the world when he represented the Foundation at the IMF and World Bank Group Annual Meetings in Washington D.C. In rooms where global fiscal priorities are debated and development agendas are set, he arrived not merely as an observer, but as a young economist with a clear sense of what numbers alone cannot capture.
From Community to Complexity
Andreas’s path to policy is not a conventional one. His early education included vocational training alongside academic study — experiences that placed him in hospitals, aged care centres and community service settings before he had finished school. He learned to carry plates under pressure and to sit with people in their most vulnerable moments. These are not the usual credentials of an economist, but for Andreas, they are foundational. They are where his understanding of human development — not just economic development — was first formed.
“Working with vulnerable people early on taught me something that no dataset can fully capture,” he reflects. “Systems either serve people or they don’t. And when they don’t, the cost is carried by those who can least afford it.”
That insight has shaped how he approaches the economics of urban life. Cities are systems — of transport, housing, infrastructure, and opportunity — and the decisions that shape them carry consequences that are anything but abstract. For low-income communities, inadequate infrastructure is not an inconvenience; it is a compounding disadvantage that limits access to jobs, education and health. Evidence-informed policy, in Andreas’s view, must grapple with this reality honestly.
The Gap Between Data and Justice
At the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, Andreas encountered the full architecture of global economic decision-making — the models, the metrics, the multilateral frameworks that guide how governments invest, borrow and build. It was, by any measure, a formidable environment for an emerging voice. But it also reinforced a tension he had long observed: the gap between what data measures and what communities actually need.
Economic indicators are powerful tools, but they can obscure as much as they reveal. GDP growth does not automatically capture whether new infrastructure reaches the people who need it most. Efficiency metrics do not always account for who bears the cost of optimisation. Andreas argues that the next frontier of evidence-based leadership is not simply gathering better data — it is asking better questions about whose lives that data is meant to improve.
“Good data is important,” he says, “but purpose gives it direction.”
That purpose, for Andreas, is urban equity. In Australia and across the globe, cities are at a crossroads. The pressures of population growth, climate change and rising inequality are converging on the built environment in ways that demand more than technical solutions. They demand leadership that can hold both the complexity of economic systems and the humanity of the people who live within them.
Building the Leadership We Need
What distinguishes Andreas’s approach is his refusal to separate the technical from the relational. Economic policy, in his view, is never neutral. It reflects choices about whose needs are prioritised, whose voices are included in planning processes, and what kind of future we are willing to invest in. Infrastructure justice — the equitable distribution of public investment — is not a niche concern. It is central to whether Australian cities can be both sustainable and inclusive in the decades ahead.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, this kind of integrated thinking — analytically rigorous and deeply human — is precisely what the Global Voices Fellowship is designed to cultivate. Supporting emerging leaders like Andreas means investing in a generation of policymakers and practitioners who understand that the purpose of evidence is not to justify existing decisions, but to imagine and build better ones.
Andreas’s journey — from a VET classroom in Melbourne’s west to the halls of the IMF — is a reminder that leadership does not follow a single path. It grows wherever curiosity, purpose and commitment to people converge.
Andreas Zakhari is a 2024 Menzies Global Voices Fellow. Applications for the 2026 Global Voices Fellowship are now open. If you are committed to leadership that bridges economic rigour and human development, we invite you to explore the Fellowship and stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation’s broader emerging leadership community.
At the Menzies Leadership Foundation, we believe the most consequential policy decisions of our time will not be made by data alone — they will be made by leaders who understand what data is for. The challenges facing our cities demand more than technical expertise. They require the capacity to ask harder questions: who does this serve, who is left behind, and what kind of future are we actually building?
The Global Voices Fellowship is designed to develop exactly this kind of thinking — analytically sharp, ethically grounded, and oriented toward justice. As urbanisation accelerates and inequality deepens, the human dimensions of policy leadership matter more than ever: the ability to translate complexity into action, to hold both systems and people in view, and to bring communities into the decisions that shape their lives.
Andreas’s story is one example of what this leadership looks like in practice. There are many more waiting to be developed. We stand at a critical moment for cities, for communities, and for the leaders who can bring them closer together.
Explore the Global Voices Fellowship. Engage with the Menzies Leadership Foundation. Help us build the evidence-informed, human-centred leadership our cities deserve.
