Europe & Central Asia
The challenges
Out of 40 UNECE member countries with data, only 13% have legislation requiring specialized gender-based surveys and only 8% have a regular dedicated budget for gender statistics. Furthermore, only 22% of UNECE countries have a coordinating body for gender statistics. The low priority given to gender within national statistical systems is evident in organizational structures, budget allocation, and the absence of a strong commitment to gender monitoring and reporting in national statistical strategies and plans. Together, weak policy space, limited resources and a lack of coordination, mean that gender statistics are not adequately mainstreamed in statistical production.
The Women Count response includes
- Supporting countries to identify and address institutional, legal and financial constraints to gender mainstreaming in their national statistical systems and to establish an efficient monitoring and evaluation system for the SDGs;
- Producing gender-related SDG factsheets as advocacy materials to be used for SDG nationalization and localization, providing opportunities to work at country-level on streamlining and monitoring gender-related goals and making these processes more cost-effective and stustainable; and
- Organizing and participating in user-producer events at the national and the regional level.
The challenges
Technical challenges limit the effective and efficient production of gender statistics. Although data production is relatively strong in the ECA region, ongoing issues related to data sensitivity and transparency result in data either not being collected or not being released. Increasing demands for monitoring and reporting on progress towards Agenda 2030 reveal a scarcity of disaggregated data, especially by ethnicity and disability. Currently, over half of countries regularly produce gender statistics on power and decision-making, but that percentage drops to 42% for unpaid work, 41% for violence against women.
The Women Count response includes
- Supporting efforts at national and regional levels to improve data availability, to report on national and international commitments on gender equality and women’s empowerment by strengthening capacities to design, collect, process and analyse data from different data sources;
- Improving capacity-building for countries to produce gender-related SDGs indicators, by conducting a gender survey and processing additional indicators from available data at the national level; and
- Supporting countries to assess and explore the administrative data relevant for producing gender-related indicators.
The challenges
Ineffective use of gender statistics is the most problematic issue for gender monitoring and reporting in the ECA region. Production is relatively strong, and dissemination of data and microdata is improving, but gaps in the capacity to access and use that information persist. Almost all countries regularly produce ‘women and men’ publications and some have established gender statistics databases. But the demand for support to improve dissemination, communication and use of data seems to outweigh the supply of funding and technical assistance.
The Women Count response includes
- Promoting greater use of and access to timely, high-quality data by supporting countries to: identify user’s needs and engage in regular dialogue and partnership with users; develop various dissemination tools that are fit-for-purpose for different needs; and train non-statistician users on basic statistical literacy;
- Developing a Beta Version of a Gender Data Visualization Platform and supporting at least two countries from the region to customize and operationalize it; and
- Supporting countries to improve statistical literacy by promoting new formats and tools to disseminate gender statistics, such as user-friendly publications, competitions to write human stories, hackathons, etc.
- With support from UN Women, a national study produced new data on violence against women in Georgia, including the first-ever data on sexual harassment and stalking. The data were successfully used to advocate for a new law outlawing sexual harassment, passed by Parliament in May 2019.
- In Albania, UN Women and UNDP supported the third national prevalence survey on violence against women, collecting the first data on dating violence, sexual harassment and stalking.
- Through participation in the Issue-Based Coalition on Data for the SDGs (IBC–SDGs Data), UN Women contributed to an exercise by UN agencies to support implementation of the 2030 Agenda in five countries: Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Montenegro.
- In cooperation with UNECE and the Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland, UN Women organized a workshop on Finding and Filling Gaps in Gender Statistics for SDG Monitoring. Held in Switzerland in May 2019, the workshop was attended by 30 participants – mostly from Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia countries. It covered new topics for these countries, such as: i) entrepreneurship statistics with a gender dimension and ii) measuring women’s representation in local government.
- Training workshops for statisticians and other data producers from selected countries (such as Albania, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan), were jointly organized by UN Women, relevant stakeholders and UN partners. In Kyrgyzstan, training on new data-collection methods on violence against women and human trafficking reached 97 participants from the National Statistical Committee and Ministry of Internal Affairs.
