On Monday, 20 March, at the start of the second week of the 61st UN Commission on the Status of Women, the UCLG Standing Committee on Gender Equality was invited to make a statement to the Interactive Expert Panel on “Enhancing the availability and use of data and gender statistics to support accelerated implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
In the statement, UCLG argued that “the participation of women in local decision-making is the foundation of global development” and that this requires “a gendered approach to all 17 Goals, the empowerment of women at all levels in the implementation of the Agenda, and data disaggregated at local and subnational levels”.
UCLG celebrated that target 5.5. of the SDGs directly address women’s political participation, and commended the “great step” made by including indicator 5.5.1 on the representation of women in local government. We called on the international community “to make improving data on gender equality in local government a priority to drive the achievement of SDG 5 and, in particular, to support efforts to gather data on the proposed SDG indicator 5.5.1”.
Both the Swiss and the Mexican delegates made references to data at the local government level in this session, a sign of the growing acknowledgement by Member States of the importance of locally disaggregated data for development.
