Gender and Statistics Network - GESNET

Background

A product of the Development Account Project on “Strengthening the Capacity of African Statistical Systems to generate gender disaggregated Data to support policies to promote gender equality and empowerment of women” which was jointly implemented by the African Centre for Gender and Social Development (ACGS) and the  African Centre for Statistics (ACS) in 2007 - GESNET,  aims at enabling the implementation of gender mainstreaming at ECA and within  African Member States. GESNET therefore contributes to the accomplishment of a key ECA strategic programme objective to promote gender equality and empower women, which is Millennium Development Goal number 3(MDG 3). More particularly, the project sharpened the monitoring instruments to track progress towards this goal as well as other goals, such as good governance, for which ECA has developed indicators and continues to refine them.

The Project activities include:

• Desk work on Engendering the United Nations Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses;
• Developing of sectoral African Gender and Development Indices (AGDI) for Agriculture and trade; and
• Setting up of a devoted collaborative workspace for the Gender Statistics Network (GESNET).
•  Organizing workshops in the five ECA sub-regions in order to disseminate the tools developed by ECA, in particular in this project.

The Gender Statistics Network (GESNET)

Even though gender equality and women’s empowerment is an internationally agreed goal enshrined in MDG 3, national and regional statistical systems in Africa have not made the type of progress in designing systems and operations to generate gender-responsive data that are needed to support the progress that have been made in raising awareness of social and economic implications of gender imbalances.  The GESNET is meant to promote dialogue among practitioners including gender specialists and statisticians in order to overcome the gaps of the statistical systems in Africa. The GESNET workspace is designed for the users of all statistical stakeholders including policy makers and planners, civil society organizations (CSOs) and the general public.

Objectives of the GESNET

• To provide an exchange environment on issues related to gender responsive data; 

• To provide support and advise for gender-sensitive policy and programme formulation;

• To create synergies among actors in order to strengthen advocacy on gender measurements;

• To host discussions between gender specialists and gender statistics experts and other interested actors;

• To spread best practices in particular in gender measurement issues;

• To provide relevant links to gender and development databases and gender websites ;

Founding Principles of the Network

• Active participation: All members should actively participate in the discussion forum. They must ask questions, give their opinions on issues under discussion; raise their concern with respect to any measurement problems related to gender;

• Openness: Several measurement issues with respect to gender are pending. Therefore, members of the network are invited to be innovative and to propose for discussion any related issues;

• Policy commitment: Gender specialists should monitor the development of emerging gender issues in order to invite gender statistics experts to care take of them;

• Advocacy function:   Members should advocate in recalling the importance of gender –responsive data in National Strategies for the Development of Statistics (NSDSs) and regional programmes.

Keeping in mind the twelve critical areas of concern of the Beijing Platform for Action, in order to provide the tools and data capable of monitoring the progress made in the accomplishment of the goals set up in these respective areas.

Who it is meant for ?

• Producers and users of statistics
• Policy makers and planners
• Non-Governmental Organizations
• Gender equality advocates
• Media
• General public