April 2018 March 2019 Concept Note

Strengthening data and statistics for evidence-based policies and programmes to achieve gender equality and women s empowerment in the ESCAP region (Gender Policy-Data Initiative) 1. Background April 2018 March 2019 Concept Note Gender-sensitive data and statistics are essential for rigorous policy analysis and advocacy to promote gender equality and women s empowerment (GEEW). The findings of the recent Global Gender Gap Report 2017 highlights two facts regarding gender equality and women s empowerment across member States of ESCAP. First, while the report ranks New Zealand and Philippines among the world s top ten countries in reducing the gender gap, it concludes that 18 ESCAP member States fall behind the global average based on a total of 144 countries. Secondly, the report highlights that only 33 out of 58 ESCAP member States had enough data to be part of the ranking. In other words, many countries in the region have a long way to go to achieve the ambition of gender equality and women s empowerment, and at the same time, substantial number of countries simply do not have the basic data for meaningful gender analysis. In recent years, a lot of attention has been drawn to women s economic empowerment issues and related data. The first report of the UN Secretary-General s High-level Panel on Women s Economic Empowerment pointed out that the lack of relevant and reliable gender-sensitive and disaggregated data, including comparable cross-country data are severely constraining the understanding of issues pertaining to women s empowerment to succeed and advance economically and to make and act on economic decisions. A gender data gaps mapping exercise by Data2X, covering censuses, surveys, administrative sources and big data, pointed out that data availability and coverage was particularly poor for economic indicators, with less than a third of countries globally disaggregating data by sex in areas such as informal employment, entrepreneurship, and unpaid work, among others. At the same time, the region-wide review of the Core Set of Gender Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 1 conducted in 2014, revealed wide variations across Asia-Pacific subregions in the collection of data and production of indicators across domains such as poverty, participation in productive activities and participation in unremunerated productive work. The call for improving data on women s economic empowerment was also reiterated at the most recent session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW61), which focused on the theme of Women s economic empowerment in the changing world of work. The Commission raised attention to the need for development of standards and methodologies at the national and global levels to improve the collection, analysis and dissemination of gender-sensitive data on such issues as the formal and informal economy; women s poverty, intra-household income and asset distribution; unpaid care work, women s access to, control and ownership of assets and other productive resources, and also women s participation at all levels of decision-making. It called for a combination of strengthening national statistical capacity as well as mobilizing financial and 1 See E/ESCAP/CST(4)/10 for the list of indicators 1

technical assistance to enable systematic design, collection, and access to high-quality, reliable and timely data disaggregated by sex, age, income and other characteristics relevant in national contexts. Also, the first Report of the UN Secretary-General s High-level Panel on Women s Economic Empowerment (2016) highlighted that the data revolution called for in the 2030 Agenda must have women and girls at its heart. It emphasized that not only must key economic data be disaggregated by sex and other relevant characteristics to highlight causes of gender gaps, but that improved data production and analysis is needed on issues of particular relevance to women s economic empowerment, including unpaid care, informal, part-time, and domestic work. Harnessing digital technologies, as well as the presentation of data in formats that will be useful for policymakers, advocates and researchers was highlighted as critical in this context. 2. Commitments, ongoing efforts and continuing challenges to improve gender-sensitive data in the Asia-Pacific region In endorsing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, heads of states and governments around the world committed that the goals and targets met for all nations and peoples and for all segments of society, which is captured by the term leave no one behind. The Sustainable Development Goals not only have gender equality and women s empowerment as a stand-alone goal, but gender equality targets are embedded in several other Goals. For instance, several issues pertaining to women s economic empowerment are embedded in goals 1 (no poverty), 5 (gender equality), 8 (decent work and economic growth) and 10 (reduce inequality). At the same time, the 2030 Agenda is cognizant of the fact that not all women have access to the same advantages or face the same disadvantages, and to the same extent. This is captured in the principle of the global indicator framework that indicators should be disaggregated, where appropriate, by a range of characteristics such as age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographical location etc., in addition to sex, that would help identify population groups falling farthest behind. Commitments towards achieving gender equality and women s empowerment have also been made by Governments in the Asia-Pacific region through the Beijing +15 and Beijing +20 review processes in recent years. The need to enhance the development of gender-sensitive indicators, including the collection and dissemination of data disaggregated by sex was reiterated in these reviews. This is to ensure that gender-sensitive data are available and adequately used to advocate for and monitor policies across the twelve priority areas of the Beijing Platform for Action. In the last few years, national statistical systems have been making efforts to improve the production and dissemination of data disaggregated by sex as a standard practice. Also, quite a number of countries in the region have appointed gender focal points in national statistical offices and statistical units in line ministries. At the same time, various United Nations agencies with statistics programmes, including UN Women, UNFPA, FAO, ILO, UNEP, UNICEF, UNESCO, ESCAP etc, have consistently made efforts to integrate gender in their work programme to varying degrees. While countries and development partners across Asia and the Pacific have been striving to improve statistics and data to support policies and programmes to promote gender equality and women s empowerment, there are still a number of persisting and emerging challenges that need to be overcome in producing, disseminating and using gender-sensitive data to support evidence- 2

based decision-making regarding gender equality. These challenges include: a) insufficient capacity to produce a basic range of economic, social and environmental statistics required for national development policies and programmes, which is the basis for producing sex-disaggregated data; b) data collection on key issues of gender equality are not part of official statistical programmes, such as unpaid work and domestic care, violence against women and girls, gender-based asset ownership and entrepreneurship etc., most of which are emerging issues; and c) large amounts of existing statistics and data, including those that are sex-disaggregated, are not analysed, interpreted and used. 3. Needs and opportunities to step up support at regional level (ESCAP s approach) Leveraging on the country commitment to SDG monitoring and ongoing efforts by governments, civil society organizations, academia and development partners, countries in the region can benefit from stepped-up investment for quick-wins and long-term capacity development, with a focus on less developed countries. Such needs and opportunities can be clustered into three broad areas: 1. Policy-data integration: Existing national development strategies and plans are often not specific about population groups and issues for intervention. In addition, they lack supporting monitoring and indicator frameworks specifying data disaggregation requirements by sex and other population characteristics. While these may be partly attributed to the lack of comprehensive and high-quality statistical evidence, this in turn hampers the provision of the necessary level of political, institutional and financial support required to enhance the availability of gender-sensitive statistics, thus causing a vicious cycle of inadequate demand and insufficient statistics. 2. Availability and quality of gender-sensitive data: While in recent years statistical standards have been/are being deliberated and agreed upon by the international statistical community in several areas such as unpaid work, asset ownership, women s entrepreneurship, informal sector and informal employment, violence against women etc., the application and use of these standards by national statistical systems has not kept pace and requires capacity development and uptake at the national level. These may be again due to lack of effective demand (see above) for and consequently insufficient support to gender-sensitive statistics and data. 3. Accessibility and use of existing data: While there are large gaps in availability and quality of gender-sensitive data, a lot of existing data remains unused or inadequately used, which limits the availability and robustness of gender policy analysis at the national level. 4. Objectives and duration of the Gender Data-Policy Initiative In response to the above needs and challenges, the Gender Policy-Data Initiative, is designed to: Raise awareness among the statistical and user communities on the current status/progress on selected women s economic empowerment issues relevant in the national context. Enhance capacity of national statistical systems in engaging with policy counterparts to identify information needs for selected women s economic empowerment issues Strengthen statistical capacity of national statistical systems in: 3

- The use of existing international statistical standards pertaining to selected women s economic empowerment issues (such as unpaid work, asset ownership, entrepreneurship, informal sector/informal employment, violence in the workplace) - Application and use of innovative approaches to enhance production of related disaggregated data. - Analysis and use of existing gender-sensitive data for progress monitoring and policy advocacy. The Initiative, which will be implemented from April 2018 March 2019, contributes to the 10th Tranche global Development Account Programme (DA10), Pillar 3 component 4 (gender statistics) 2, being implemented by the five Regional Commissions in collaboration with the United Nations Statistics Division. In Asia and the Pacific region, the Initiative contributes to the 2018-19 objective of the Economic and Social Commission in Asia and the Pacific, Section 19, subprogramme 7 (Statistics): to improve the availability, accessibility and use of quality data and statistics in support of sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific. In particular, it supports the expected accomplishment EA (b): Increased institutional capacity of national statistical systems to produce, disseminate and communicate statistical products and services, in particular in relation to the goals, targets and indicators of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; and expected accomplishment EA (c): Increased and improved use by national statistical offices of data sources generated by components of the national data ecosystem for the production of official statistics. The Regional Steering Group on Population and Social Statistics (RSG-PSS) 3 has already adopted a work plan along the lines of the ESCAP approach mentioned earlier, covering the three broad areas of (i) creating an enabling policy environment at the national level (ii) enhancing data production and (iii) enhancing data analysis and use. The Gender Policy-Data Initiative is designed to replicate and build on the same approach for issues related to gender equality and women s empowerment. 5. Interventions and expected outputs of the Gender Policy-Data Initiative To address the challenges and in line with the above-mentioned approach, ESCAP, in partnership with relevant and interested agencies, plans to support a selected number of countries in the region (hereafter referred to as project countries) in carrying out: I. Enabling national policy environment -- Identification of, and agreement on key statistical information needs to support policies and programmes for women s economic empowerment: Development, application and refinement of technical tools for leaders and senior management of national statistical systems to engage with their policy counterparts to 2 But also contributes to Pillar 3 component 3 (population and demographic statistics) and component 5 (poverty and inequality statistics) 3 All ESCAP member States were invited to join the RSG-PSS (under the Committee on Statistics) in 2017. Twentyeight ESCAP member States expressed interest in joining the RSG-PSS. The membership was endorsed by the Bureau of the Committee on Statistics. The RSG-PSS met for the first time in August 2017 and agreed on a workplan. See http://www.unescap.org/events/first-meeting-regional-steering-group-population-and-social-statisticsand-expert-meeting 4

formulate a monitoring and indicator framework, or revise an existing one, for national plans/strategies to promote gender equality and women s empowerment, including the specification of data disaggregation by sex and other population characteristics for the relevant indicators. Output/s for I: (i) Technical tools for policy review and identification of information needs on GEEW issues, with a focus on women s economic empowerment, at the national level (ESCAP and partners). (ii) A set of country studies/reports applying the above-mentioned tools to conduct a review of relevant national policies for identification of priority population groups and issues (project countries with ESCAP/partner s support). (iii) A monitoring framework and indicator set for relevant national plans/strategies to promote gender equality and women s economic empowerment. II. Availability and quality of disaggregated statistics -- Strengthening gender-responsive statistics pertaining to women s economic empowerment: Mapping of data and capacity gaps/strengths in terms of production, dissemination and use (based on outputs generated in item I), including diagnosis of system level opportunities/weaknesses. Application/adoption of existing internationally agreed statistical standards, including concepts, classifications, measurement guidelines to support enhanced gender-sensitive data quality and production (e.g. on women s unpaid work, asset ownership, entrepreneurship, informal sector/informal employment, violence in the workplace etc.). Identification and promotion of innovative solutions to combine data from different sources (such as use of techniques like small area estimation, synthetic population generation etc.) and identification and use of non-conventional data sources (such as big data) to augment the production of sex-disaggregated data. Output/s for II: (i) Improved/refined national data collection tools based on international statistical standards (project countries with ESCAP/partner s support); (ii) Increased availability of disaggregated data through application of international statistical standards or use of data integration techniques (project countries with ESCAP/partner s support). III. Data accessibility, analysis, interpretation and use -- Strengthening accessibility, analysis and use of existing data on women s economic empowerment issues: Status analysis/progress assessment using selected GEEW indicators on women s economic empowerment in support of monitoring on or more of the following: - National comprehensive development plans/strategies - National gender equality plans/strategies - National SDG framework - Relevant sectoral development plans/strategies - Global SDG framework; Core set of gender indicators for Asia and the Pacific Regular national user-producer dialogues for improved understanding of statistical information and to address data gaps. 5

Analysis, interpretation, and regular publication of gender-sensitive data to inform decision-making including the analysis and interpretation of indicator data and microdata at national and local levels. Output/s for III: (i) Template/guidance note for conducting status analysis/ progress assessment of GEEW indicators at the national level, with a focus on women s economic empowerment, including for the SDGs indicators (ESCAP and partners). (ii) National analytical reports on status analysis/ progress assessment based on selected GEEW indicators related to women s economic empowerment (project countries with ESCAP/partner s support); (iii) A well-functioning userproducer coordination mechanism at national level related to production, analysis and use of gender-sensitive data (project countries with ESCAP/partner s support). 6. Project country selection and modality of implementation Project countries Invitations will be extended to members of the RSG-PSS, who previously expressed interest in conducting related work 4, to participate in the Initiative and deliver the outputs as per time frame set out. Due to budgetary and other limitations, the Initiative may be able to accommodate up to THREE countries 5. A country s participation will depend on: Commitment to formulate a country team with required skills: each country team to consist of 3 members (one each from the national statistical office (team leader), national mechanism for the advancement of women, and focal point from national SDG implementation body or relevant line ministry). Between its members, each team should have the following: - Substantive knowledge and understanding of national policy issues related to women s economic empowerment and types of disaggregation required. - Knowledge of related data sources/ data collection tools/methods used in the country. - Skills and experience in conducting analyses of related policy issues. - Understanding/experience in data collection and the use of advanced statistical techniques (such as small area estimation). Commitment to carry out all the project activities as described in the next section Role, preparation and implementation by project country teams. This includes agreement by supervisors of all team members on the allocation of time and other resources to perform the tasks of the project. Identification of one priority issue on women s economic empowerment relevant in the national context and participation in/ implementation of the activities, leading to the outputs mentioned above within the set time frame. 4 Through the first meeting of the RSG-PSS in August 2017. 5 More countries could be supported if funds are available from other partners. 6

Availability of national indicators pertaining to women s economic empowerment issues (or willingness to work with selected indicators pertaining to women s economic empowerment from the global SDG framework or the Core set of Gender Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 1 ). Inception workshop, April 2018 ESCAP will organise an Inception Workshop in April 2018 with the objectives of: Introducing the Gender Policy-Data Initiative to project countries; Introducing and applying the draft tool on identification of information needs through review of national policy and planning documents (under intervention # I: Enabling national policy environment above); and the template/guidelines for conducting status analysis/ progress assessment (under intervention # III: Data accessibility, analysis, interpretation above); Sharing existing country practices and challenges on collecting, analysing and using data on women s economic empowerment; and Agree on the project focus and workplan for each project country. The Inception Workshop will primarily focus on interventions # I (Enabling national policy environment) and III (Data accessibility, analysis, interpretation and use) above. Intervention # 2 (Availability and quality of disaggregated statistics) will be taken up through technical advisory services as part of the above and to the extent possible/practical within the time frame of the project. The Inception Workshop is expected to result in: Preliminary identification of a national indicators as well as population groups, issues, disaggregated data needs for the selected policy issue related to women s economic empowerment based on the related national policy and planning document/s selected by the project country. Initial recommendations/feedback from project countries to refine the draft template/guidelines for conducting status analysis/ progress assessment of GEEW issues at the national level, with a focus on women s economic empowerment. Preliminary work plan for national activities, including a national consultative workshop to apply the tools under interventions I and III mentioned above. The workplan will outline the objectives; selected policy issues and documents to be reviewed; stakeholders to be involved; timelines for preparatory work; and risks and possible alternatives etc. Capacity building and technical assistance ESCAP will subsequently arrange to provide technical support and guidance either directly or through experts and partners on the various substantive aspects of the project. Statistical capacity building support is to be provided through a combination of regional and national workshops as well as technical advisory services based on individual needs of countries. For any data related work within the above interventions, it is important that country teams provide data access and use permission to ESCAP/ experts, who will be working with and assisting the country teams. 7

7. Role, preparation and implementation by project country teams Each team is expected to carry out the following activities (among others as may be needed): A. Prepare for and attend Inception Workshop, scheduled in April 2018 in Bangkok, Thailand. Prior to the workshop, each team is expected to: 1. Identify national policy frameworks (comprehensive development plans/strategies, gender equality plan/strategy, sectoral plans/strategies), which cover issues on women s economic empowerment. This can cover a range of topics such as such as women s unpaid work, asset ownership, entrepreneurship, informal sector/informal employment, violence in the workplace etc. 2. In connection with this, conduct a national reflection with relevant national stakeholders and complete a Questionnaire on National Policy Frameworks in the context of Women s Economic Empowerment (Questionnaire to be provided by ESCAP and must be completed and returned to ESCAP prior to the workshop in accordance with deadline to be set). The national reflection and completion of the Questionnaire on National Policy Frameworks in the context of Women s Economic Empowerment will be very critical to understand national policy issues on women s economic empowerment relevant for the country, data available, and data gaps. This will help in identification of one topic of national policy interest in the context of women s economic empowerment for further research and improvement of disaggregated and gender-sensitive data under the current Initiative. 3. Prepare a presentation for the Inception Workshop. The presentation will cover, (final guidelines/template to be circulated later by ESCAP closer to the workshop): Findings of the Questionnaire on National Policy Frameworks in the context of women s economic empowerment. Objectives of any previous data collection on women s economic empowerment, sources and methodology used. Key users of women s economic empowerment data. Examples of how any existing data on women s economic empowerment has been used and analysed for policy purposes in the country, including statistical and policy reports on (MDG, SDG) progress assessment and research studies that focus or cover issues related to women s economic empowerment, if any. 4. Prepare to bring the following to the Inception Workshop in soft and hard copies for handson group work and application of the tools (final list and instructions to be circulated later by ESCAP closer to the workshop): (i) One or more national policy documents on one selected priority policy issue related to women s economic empowerment; (ii) Related national indicator set/framework if any, (iii) Related data files from official sources (iv) any national reports/manuals on women s economic empowerment; (v) Country presentation as described in # 3 above. 8

Attending the Inception Workshop in Bangkok: 5. Deliver presentations, actively attend presentations given by instructors and other country teams, participate in the workshop discussions and hands-on exercises. 6. Prepare and finalize a work plan for implementation and completion of national activities (based on template to be provided by ESCAP). B. After the Inception Workshop, each country team is to: 1. Prepare for and organize a national consultative workshop involving multiple stakeholders (such as the national statistical office, national women s machinery, a range of line ministries responsible for women s economic empowerment, national SDG bodies, civil society organizations, national experts etc.) to apply the tools to a range of policy areas pertaining to women s economic empowerment. 2. Continue to carry out activities and complete the outputs mentioned earlier i.e.: i. Country study/report applying the tool to conduct a review of relevant national policies for identification of priority population groups and issues for women s economic empowerment. ii. A monitoring framework and indicator set for relevant national plans/strategies to promote gender equality and women s economic empowerment. iii. Redefined related national data collection tools based on international statistical standards. iv. Data sets through application of international statistical standards or use of data integration techniques. v. Formulation of a well-functioning user-producer coordination mechanism at national level related to production, analysis and use of gender-sensitive data. vi. National analytical reports on status analysis/ progress assessment based on selected GEEW indicators related to women s economic empowerment. These will be done with guidance provided by ESCAP and experts, with consultations provided through email and other electronic means. It is expected that there will be multiple iterations between each country team and ESCAP/the experts providing the consultation. Each country team is expected to seek feedback from ESCAP/the experts by posing questions and sharing drafts for feedback as per timelines set by the experts. It is important that team members discuss and react to the feedback by ESCAP/the experts. All teams are expected to complete their outputs by March 2019. C. Presentation of results in a regional workshop (tentative) Once outputs have been finalized by countries, a regional workshop (tentative) may be organized by ESCAP (if funds permit) to share the results and experiences with other countries in the Asia-pacific region. 9