The international statistical community has continued to work together, throughout the current COVID-19 crisis, to provide reliable and trustworthy data and statistics to inform decision-making and pandemic response efforts. The Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities (CCSA) has now released a third report on “How Covid-19 is changing the world: a statistical perspective,” which updates some of the global and regional trends from the first and second volumes, featuring contributions from UN Women and other international organizations.
This third report highlights how COVID-19 continues to disrupt progress and upend hard-fought gains, especially on gender equality. The pandemic is estimated to have pushed 119-124 million people into poverty in 2020, and caused the loss of 255 million full-time jobs. Moreover, as COVID-19 is causing declines in human development worldwide, the Human Development Index recorded its first drop since 1990 due to the pandemic, which has erased decades of progress in women’s labour-force participation. In fact, women have been affected by employment losses to a greater extent than men globally and across all regions. To top it off, the COVID-19 response is falling short of addressing threats to gender equality and women’s rights, according to the UNDP-UN Women COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker. The Tracker identifies a total of 992 gender-sensitive measures across 164 countries, defined as those that address violence against women, strengthen women’s economic security or support unpaid care. However, only 25 countries (12 per cent) have a holistic response, with measures that span all three domains. Worryingly, 20 per cent of countries analyzed have no gender-sensitive response measures.
The report also points out the challenges of National Statistical Systems to meet the new data demands from all sectors of society. It highlights the need to provide the resources, upgrade the statistical infrastructure, establish the partnerships and modernize the statistical systems of countries.
About the CCSA
The CCSA is comprised of international and supranational organizations, whose mandate includes the provision of international official statistics in the context of the Principles Governing International Statistical Activities and which have a permanent embedded statistical service in their organization and regular contacts with countries. The mandate of the CCSA is to ensure the efficient functioning of the international statistical system; develop common standards, platforms and methodologies; provide inter-institutional support; outreach; and advocacy for high quality official statistics.
Download the report
The first and second reports on “How COVID-19 is changing the world: a statistical perspective” were released in May and September 2020, respectively.
