Women for Water Partnership at CSW63
Reliable disaggregated data requires women
and funding commitment of donors
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Women for Water Partnership President Mariet Verhoef-Cohen ensured our messages were heard well during the CSW63 Interactive expert panel on "Women’s empowerment and the link to sustainable development addressing good practices in the data (collection) challenge:
"A lot of countries say they do not have the capacity to collect all disaggregated data as needed. That is understandable, so we applaud the call made here today to enable civil society and especially women to contribute and collect data themselves. It creates awareness on and trust in data collected and ownership to the conclusions derived from that. Validation of data may be an issue, but trends to act on are valuable in themselves. Citizen-Generated Data (CGD) - needs our support. We also need to explain to and support efforts of NGOs/CSOs to understand the importance of learning how to collect, analyze and share data. Collecting quality data is time consuming and so is interviewing. There is funding needed. Currently the standard approach of donors is that what is not documented or “evidence-based” does not get funded. NGOs/CSOs have limited time and resources, so data collection should be funded under every grant as a separate activity. We deem it very important to not “ just” collect data at household level but make a distinction into the head of each household AND the opinion of other genders in that household. Just interviewing the head of households only, in most cases men, is not going to bring out the differences. Women are very good at narratives/story-telling. We need to translate those stories into data/statistics. And, we need to enhance existing information and increase awareness on available tools, such as the gender-water toolkit of WWAP." |
The data challenge
Reliable data is critical for monitoring progress for women and girls across many goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Robust gender statistics are needed to inform evidence-based and gender-responsive policy design to support Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) implementation and ensure accountability. However, significant gaps in gender statistics and the lack of trend data make it difficult to monitor progress for women and girls. Data and statistics on marginalized groups—such as women and girls with disabilities, migrant, refugee and displaced women and girls and those living in rural areas — remain largely invisible in official statistics. To this end, innovative approaches in the collection, analysis and use of gender statistics as well as collaboration between stakeholders are crucial to realizing the commitment to leave no one behind from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Actions aimed to ensure a gender-responsive approach in national follow-up and review of the SDGs require enhanced standards and methodologies for collection, analysis and dissemination of 2 gender statistics and technical capacity, backed by financial resources. Investing in national statistical capacity is central to improving the coverage, quality, and timeliness of data for monitoring gender equality and the SDGs. But beyond this, making sure that data represent the lived reality of all women and girls by addressing deep-seated biases in concepts, definitions, classifications, and methodologies, is essential to making women and girls visible. Speakers
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