A Joint Announcement on Implementation of Agenda 2030 Accelerating Progress Towards Gender Equality
Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Data2X
Global Affairs Canada
UK Secretary of State for International Development
United Nations Foundation
UN Women
U.S. Agency for International Development
U.S. Department of State
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The World Bank Group

Launched at the 2016 Women Deliver Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark
May 17, 2016
01. In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus Resolution 70/1: Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (the 2030 Agenda).

02. The Resolution states that “realizing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls will make a crucial contribution to progress.”

03. The prioritization of gender equality and women’s rights is reflected in SDG 5 and in a cross-cutting manner through the 2030 Agenda, with eleven of the seventeen goals having gender-focused targets and indicators.

04. The unprecedented ambition and broad support for gender equality in this agenda must be matched by equal ambition to ensure its implementation.

05. High quality, comparable and regular gender- and age-disaggregated statistics are critically needed to address the existing data gaps and meet the ambitions of the SDGs, including the overarching aim to ‘leave no-one behind.’

06. Good gender data provides the much-needed detail on the disparities that exist between men and women and boys and girls, identifies the underlying causes of inequality, and measures the impact of policy and programmatic interventions.

07. In addition to closing pervasive gender data gaps, issues of systematic gender bias in existing measurement tools, fragmentation of gender data stakeholders, and technical and capacity challenges of national statistical systems must also be addressed.

08. Data and statistics are essential for smart policy, and the lack of reliable gender data has hindered progress on advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

09. As supporters and champions for this agenda, we recognize that gender data holds power to make the invisible, visible and actionable.

10. Our shared ambition is not just to have good data on women and girls, but to ensure that it is used by governments, policy-makers, program designers, civil society and women themselves to hold stakeholders accountable for progress.

11. The group of organizations represented here is committed to supporting the acceleration towards gender equality as outlined in Agenda 2030 and are announcing today that we will increase our focus and investments towards closing the core gender data challenges. We believe this is an urgent step in the process of implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.