Forget development if data not gender-driven

What you need to know:

  • We need gender-sensitive data to influence change not generalised data
  • Women at the grassroots can be mobilised to capture information on indicators related to SGDs
  • Information can be used by government, policy makers, civil society and development partners to design programs responding to gender-specific needs

As countries race against time to beat the 2030 deadline of achieving gender equality, data responsive to obstacles hindering attainment of the target stands out as an inevitable asset.

To remedy dearth of gender responsive data as a precondition for fair and equal development, Africa’s gender equality advocates are now calling for innovative approaches directly involving women.

Mr Ned Mkumba, senior field officer at Malawi-based Human Rights Resource Centre said it would be difficult to achieve gender equality without data responsive to challenges compounding women and men’s access to human rights.

“We need gender-sensitive data to influence change not generalised data,” he spoke in Nairobi on Wednesday during a forum on data-driven advocacy.

By use of gender barometer, women at the grassroots can be mobilised to capture information on different indicators relating to the 17 SGDs, he said.

SPECIFIC NEEDS

This information can then be shared with the government and utilised by policy makers, civil society and development partners to design programs responding to the specific needs of men and women.

In Rwanda, families lock out children with disabilities from attending school because they consider them ‘useless’, according to Ms Anisia Byukusenye, gender and disability facilitator at Rwanda-based Volunteer Services Overseas.

Involving communities to provide information on the number of families and children affected would assist in establishing adequate and easily accessible schools for them, she said.

“If you have a disability, your parent will say you have no role to play in the society and so they won’t struggle to take you to the school in a hilly place or far away from home. But they would change that attitude if many schools were built around their homes,” she said.

GENDER EQUALITY

Ms Emily Maranga, program manager for Women Leadership and Governance at Groots Kenya, said data collected by women tells a complete story about their challenges, hence informing proper designing of all-inclusive redress mechanisms.

“For example, the government (while collecting data) will count ten women who don’t have access to water but the women will count, ten women do not have access to water but five of them walk more than 20 kilometers (to fetch water) and they walk through the forest where there is an elephant or they are  raped,” she explained.

The 2019 Equal Measures 2030 report on progress of implementing SDGs indicated that no country in the world has achieved the promise of gender equality.

 The report on Harnessing the power of data for gender equality: Introducing the 2019 EM2030 SDG Gender Index, noted that despite efforts of reducing inequality gaps, still 2.8 billion women and girls globally lived in “poor” or “very poor” countries where Africa falls.