Progress in efforts at promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment can only be measured when conscious effort is made to build the capacity of African countries on the collection, compilation and dissemination of gender-related statistics.

It is on this basis that the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs, in collaboration with the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), is spearheading efforts to bring coherence into the collection of administrative statistics.

These were contained in an address delivered on behalf of the Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs, Mrs Juliana Azumah-Mensah, at the opening of a Regional Conference on Gender Statistics    in Accra, yesterday.

Mrs Azumah-Mensah said the meeting was extremely necessary as it targeted two critical issues of gender and data which demanded major attention for the attainment of Millennium Development Goal three (3).

The purpose of the four-day conference is to take stock of progress in the development of gender statistics, the goals accomplished in support of disparities in society and to review some of the specific outputs from efforts in the measurement of some features of gender gaps.

It is being organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in collaboration with the GSS.

The conference will also develop statistics that effectively support the formulation, programming, monitoring and evaluation of equal opportunities for all women and men, and boys and girls on gender statistics.

Welcoming participants to the meeting, the Government Statistician, Dr. Grace Bediako, said  the conference provided an occasion for the region to launch the Africa Gender Statistics Group (AGSG) which is the first of its kind to bring together not only diverse institutions and regional organisations, but also to draw together several areas of programming‒namely satellite accounts within the framework of national accounts, violence against women, cross border trade and more broadly and gender statistics‒ in a co-ordinated way.

A representative of UNECA, Ms Raj Cautam Mitra, said the meeting was the beginning of collaborative efforts to come together to discuss gender statistics and data and expressed the hope that the conference would produce concrete results.

Source: ISD (G.D. Zaney & Benjamin Amaning)

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