by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department
Amina Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General says (here): “Better data is the indispensable scaffolding that supports progress across all the SDGs,” and the UN and the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data have checked this and tell us (here) that there is “an average return of $32 for every $1 invested in strengthening data systems in low and middle income countries.”
According to the globally renown research university ETH Zurich “…data for some of the most pressing Sustainable Development Goals – including Gender Equality (Goal 5)… – remains limited”. Although we appreciate their need to be diplomatic, but seriously ‘limited’? - SDG5 has a tiny 16.9% measure of data availability (the bottom of all SDGs) see here. Shocking when one considers Energy (where the big bucks clearly reside) has 90.2% data availability. ETH Zurich kindly allow us to drill down and looking at Africa only, no surprise the numbers drop to 11.4% for SDG5 (SDG7 Energy is still top with an increase (yes!) to 90.3%).
So why is data for the SDGs and in particular SDG5 so poor if 32X is the ROI?
As ETH say: “…data…is crucial for targeting investments and guiding policies.” Targeting investments is of course our area of constant interest, not least because the massive figures being quoted by the 2X Challenge seem not to have moved the dial when it comes to VC funding of women which is extremely sticky at 2-3% of total funding. Add a man to the founding team or all men and they get the balance of er…97-98% see here from our friends at Africa: The Big Deal, yet according to the 2X Challenge there is a record amount of money flowing into women’s businesses: “…taking the total investments under the 2X Challenge since 2018 to US$ 27.7 Billion.”, (certainly something to celebrate). Obviously the 2X Challenge works across the globe, but still between 2021-22 of the total US$16.28 billion, US$4.2 billion went to Africa of which 55% to financial intermediaries (here) which must have moved the dial.
Whilst the numbers are huge and impressive, there is a fear that without measuring the impact, we could be losing efficiency much as the parable of the Farmer scattering seed tells us. How do we know if some, or even much of the cash is landing on the path, infertile land, or even if birds have swooped in and taken it? A concern voiced both by Devex (here) and Publish What You Fund (here).
As an example, so much effort, time, and money have been spent trying to create a level playing field in Law across the globe. For Law the world can only get more not less equal we all assume. Not true, as the data used in the latest World Bank report on Women, Business and the Law 2.0 (here) finds:“…women have about two-thirds of the rights of men and that nowhere in the world do women have the same legal rights as men in all of the indicators measured.” Nowhere?
What is interesting about this new report from the World Bank is that for the first time they have dug deeper into the data to measure the reality on the ground and have recognized that not only has the world moved backwards over recent years, but that the “…gap between the legal rights that women have on paper and the reality they face on the ground…often falls shockingly short.”
“Key areas such as labor market regulations, affordable and quality childcare, entrepreneurship support…lag significantly behind…Childcare indicator score of 47.6, with 90 out of 190 economies scoring 25 or lower…The Entrepreneurship indicator…is now the second-lowest-scoring indicator, with a score of just 44.2.” (Women’s safety - shocking - an article required just on that.)
Interestingly the EFT figures match! If you delve deeper into the SDG data measurements, sure enough, you see where the serious holes (within a massive hole for SDG5, lest we forget) sit. Making up 6.7% of the poor 11.4% for SDG5 is target 5. which is to do with equal rights to economic resources. Childcare which sits within target 5.4 doesn’t even register - it has a value of 0.0% of the 11.4%! We seriously wonder why this is considered ‘…limited’ by EFT when all indicators point to it being not only shocking but embarrassing, this being (the last time we checked) the 21st Century.
Trying to find an answer as to why there is no data, we turn to our well-thumbed ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ by the brilliant Caroline Criado Perez (here). In this she is quite clear: “Invisible Women is a story about absence…If there is a data gap for women overall (both because we don’t collect the data in the first place and because when we do we usually don’t separate it by sex), when it comes to women of colour disabled women, working-class women, the data is practically non-existent.”
We are mere mortals when it comes to statistics and data in comparison to the gurus at ETF, but even we can see there is a large chance there is a correlation to all these numbers. Is it therefore any surprise given the lack of data that we are on course to miss the 2030 deadline for SDG5 gender equality?
As Caroline Criado Perez writes:
“Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at the UN Foundation, points to a history of initiatives in low-income countries littered with training programmes that have failed because they ‘have been built on the mistaken assumption that women have plenty of free time, backed by limited data on women’s time-intensive work schedules’. Women may sign up for these programmes, but if the initiatives don’t account for women’s childcare demands, women don’t complete them. And that’s development money down the drain – and more women’s economic potential wasted. In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world.”
Who knows?
Stay safe.