Africa
The challenges
Despite regular censuses and surveys conducted by national statistical offices to inform data needs, there are huge gaps in obtaining data for gender-related SDG indicators across Africa. Regional stakeholders acknowledge that lack of coordination and poor communication among them has been a major drawback, leading to duplication of efforts and missed opportunities to leverage resources. At the country-level, poor policy and legal environments exist, due to limited political will and understanding of the importance of quality gender statistics.
The Women Count response includes
- Supporting countries to identify and address institutional, legal and financial constraints to ensure gender mainstreaming into the national statistical system and establish an efficient monitoring and evaluation system for the SDGs;
- Advocating for better gender data and facilitating capacity-development and knowledge-sharing through the collection, codification and dissemination of best practices; and
- Working closely with regional partners to enhance partnerships and coordinate strategic guidance, promoting South-South cooperation and collaboration to improve regional coordination and effectiveness.
The challenges
Technical challenges limit the production of gender statistics. There are few gender statistics to inform regional and country-level interventions, especially on economic opportunities, violence against women and girls, political participation, and peace and security. Countries are not systematically integrating gender into their regular statistical surveys, such as household budget surveys and living standards surveys. Moreover, gender equality usually comes as an afterthought and is limited to sex-disaggregation of data.
The Women Count response includes
- Improving data collection and production, structured around the three tier levels of the SDG indicators;
- Supporting the production of specific data on violence against women, unpaid care work, gaps in access to decent work and pay, participation in public life and decision-making, and access to and use of information and communications technologies; and
- Developing national capacities to produce Tier I indicators with the appropriate level of disaggregation, followed closely by supporting new data collection activities to produce Tier II indicators.
The challenges
Accessibility is a major issue in the region, with patterns of dissemination varying greatly among African countries. While some mechanisms such as websites, reports, dissemination workshops, and electronic media publications exist, many countries sporadically produce only a “women and men” report, which may be available in hard copy or online.
The Women Count response includes
- Supporting countries to make gender statistics accessible to all users, including governments, civil society, academia and the private sector;
- Providing advocacy material to encourage increased dissemination of data and microdata and facilitate data flows to regional and global SDG-related databases;
- Developing the capacity of national statistical systems to communicate gender statistics by better understanding user needs and producing tools such as infographics, data visualization and narratives; and
- Supporting the analysis of gender data to inform research, advocacy, policies and programmes, and to promote accountability.
- In addition to supporting pathfinder countries in the region, UN Women supported three non-pathfinder countries (Rwanda, Ethiopia and Mozambique) to develop gender statistics plans. In Ethiopia, a gender statistics project aligned with the Women Count approach was developed, with more than USD $1.5 million secured for its implementation.
- UN Women, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Development Bank (ADB) organized a Regional Consultative Workshop on Gender Statistics in October 2018, which gathered 70 gender specialists and statistician-economists from 54 African countries and local, regional and international organizations. The workshop led to the review and endorsement of gender statistics work by African Member States, including the Women Count Africa project and the AfDB-UNECA Africa Gender Index.
- UN Women signed an MOU with the SDGs Centre for Africa and co-organized a dialogue with national statistical offices and data-producing civil society organizations on the use of complimentary data for reporting and policymaking. Three pathfinder countries – Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – committed to consider complementary data.
