Brainstorming Meeting to Design Sectoral Gender Development Indexes on Agriculture and Trade

Friday 27 April 2007

Within the framework of creating synergies between ECA's various divisions and programmes, the African Center for Gender and Social Development (ACGS) is collaborating with the African Center for Statistics (ACS) to implement a development account project on 'Strengthening African Statistical Systems to Generate Gender Disaggregated Data" and elaborate sectoral indexes in two specific areas: trade and agriculture.

The ultimate goal of this project being to support national policies in achieving gender equality and women's empowerment in Africa , ACGS is endeavouring to harness the experience it has gained in developing ECA's African Gender and Development Index (AGDI) to develop these two sectoral indexes.

To this effect, a first brainstorming meeting is starting today, Friday 27 April 2007, to identify major relevant issues and indicators that the sectoral indexes should cover. The meeting will gather participants from ECA's various divisions, as well as two international experts, Karin Ulmer, Policy Officer on Trade and Gender (APRODEV, Belgium) and Werner Corrales-Leal, Senior Research Fellow, (International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, Switzerland). .

This Project comes in a timely way given the persistent need for reliable gender disaggregated data to monitor the implementation of the poverty reduction strategy programmes and the achievement of the MDGs. This is all the more critical that Africa, like the rest of the world, is bracing itself for the "

2010 Round of Population Censuses and Surveys" that will offer greater opportunities for engendering national and regional statistical databases.

The Projects aims also to achieve several specific objectives, namely:

- Enhance the availability of relevant frameworks to generate gender disaggregated data in the specific areas of agriculture and trade for better policy analysis and programme interventions

- Enhance the capacity of African countries to generate and analyze gender-disaggregated data to be used in policy formulation and programme implementation;

- Allow for a greater exchange of best practices in gender-disaggregated data compilation between national statistical services, sub-regional and regional organizations, and other stakeholders

Prior to designing the S ectoral Gender and Development Indexes in agriculture and trade, the Project will undertake a series of activities in the course of 2007, mainly the development of methodologies for engendering agricultural and trade statistics. Two expert meetings will be held at a later stage to review and validate the tools designed . In 2008, five workshops will be organized to disseminate the methodologies used to generate gender-disaggregated data.

In addition, the "Project on Strengthening African Statistical Systems to Generate Gender Disaggregated Data" will also involve the establishment of a Gender Statistics Network that will be the African arm of the Global Network on Gender Statistics.

Today's brainstorming meeting will review gender indicators and statistics on trade and assess their relevance, mainly n ational level indicators, indicators on intra-African trade and international trade

The same approach will be adopted for the gender- disaggregated statistics and corresponding indicators on agriculture. The meeting will also seek to build bridges between the two sectoral gender indexes and address the interlinkages between the two areas of agriculture and trade for a more efficient use of the sectoral Indexes.