One year after the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, a large number of organizations have learned a similar lesson: the world has to invest in better gender-specific data to track progress toward inclusive development.
A new public-private partnership dedicated to producing and collecting “gender data,” or data disaggregated by sex, received a $11 million boost at its United Nations headquarters kick-off event Wednesday afternoon.
Women and girls are routinely not counted in global and national data collected on health, education, political participation, and human security, according to the U.N. Foundation-led organization Data 2X. These data gaps “limit our ability to track progress” on gender equality and the Sustainable Development Goals, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in video remarks at the event, Making Every Woman and Girl Count.