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Improve Data and Accountability for Girls and Women

Girls and women count and must be counted. Data play a critical role in understanding gaps in programs and investments and in holding governments accountable.

Achieving progress for girls and women requires accurate, gender-disaggregated data to help policy makers, civil society organizations, and advocates make informed decisions about policies and programs that affect the lives of girls and women. Armed with this evidence, development actors can better understand the reality in the communities where they work, identify the most effective solutions, and hold governments accountable to the commitments they’ve made to advance gender equality.

100+
More than 100 low- and middle-income countries are lacking adequate civil registration and vital statistics systems.
13%
Only 13% of countries have a gender statistics budget.
22%
Only 22% of gender-specific SDG indicators have enough data available to monitor this progress.
$3 Trillion
Open data could unlock an estimated $3 trillion in annual economic potential in seven areas of the global economy.

Investing in girls and women creates a ripple effect that yields multiple benefits, not only for individual women, but also for families, communities, and countries. Sex- and age-disaggregated data are crucial in supporting civil society advocacy efforts that push for the political, social, and policy changes needed for solving complex problems.

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Invest in Girls and Women to Tackle Climate Change and Conserve the Environment
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Invest in Girls and Women to Tackle Climate Change and Conserve the Environment
Gender equality is critical to improving the environment and fighting...
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Meet the Demand for Modern Contraception and Reproductive Health
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Meet the Demand for Modern Contraception and Reproductive Health
A woman’s access to modern contraception, reproductive healthcare, and the...
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Ensure Health For All
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Ensure Health For All
Healthy girls and women are the cornerstone of healthy societies.
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Dramatically Reduce Gender-Based Violence and Harmful Practices
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Dramatically Reduce Gender-Based Violence and Harmful Practices
Eliminating the threat of gender-based violence and harmful practices is...
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  • Make gender-based analysis, budgeting, and auditing mandatory.
  • Ensure that all policies, plans, data, budgets, and audits related to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other strategies are publically available, transparent, and accessible to non-technical audiences.
  • Ensure there is adequate public financing for core national statistics systems to enable SDG monitoring.
  • Disaggregate all data by gender, age, income, and geography in order to strengthen policy making, programming, and accountability for all and to leave no one behind.
  • Invest in gender expertise and capacity within national statistics offices.
  • Align data collection approaches, national censuses, and internationally supported surveys with best practices, including the Agenda for Humanity, to track the status of all of the SDGs and indicators.
  • Facilitate partnerships between governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, and other stakeholders to share experiences around demands for data collection and to support data collection, data management, and accountability efforts.
  • Develop data collection frameworks that can account for the increased vulnerabilities of women in emergency contexts.
  • Conduct gender auditing of tax and expenditure policies to identify non-gender-equitable policies.
  • Monitor progress of policy commitments and budget allocations at national and sub-national levels and advocate for adjustments to these policies and budgets as needed.
  • Support global and national advocacy and accountability through a thriving civil society, including the women’s movement.
  • Boost data literacy across civil society to support uptake and understanding of data ecosystems and how data can be used for influencing.
Explore the Policy Brief
Making Girls & Women Count: A Q&A with Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women

Making Girls & Women Count: A Q&A with Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women

Data are about more than numbers. It's about individual girls and women. And it's about making sure every life counts and is counted. Deliver for Good Influencer and Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka shares insight on the role of data and accountability in advancing gender equality.

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