2020 was projected to be a pivotal year for women and gender equality; marking 20 years since the landmark UN Security Council Resolution on Women, Peace and Security, and 25 years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The COVID-19 tidal wave hit us and brought inequalities to the fore, gender inequalities as well as compounding inequalities linked to race, ethnicity, geography, disability and many others.

Women had to make many sacrifices to help others, whether on the frontline providing healthcare services, bearing the increased care burden at home, or living through lockdown with their abusers. COVID-19 has brought into sharp relief the gender inequalities that our SDG Gender Index found exist in every country in the world.

While adapting to new ways of living and working, our Partnership has continued our work globally, regionally, and in our focus countries to ensure that gender equality and gender data remain a priority during the crisis and beyond.

Just as the pandemic was setting in, we launched the Bending the Curve research, which tracks past progress on five critical gender equality issues and forecasts whether countries will meet the SDG targets by 2030.  How quickly has your country moved over the past 10 or 20 years on increasing access to contraception, ensuring girls finish secondary school, having women represented in senior Government roles, making work laws more equal, and ensuring women and girls feel safe?  You can check out your country’s track record on our Data Hub here.

Not only did we maintain our work, we also grew. We welcomed Tableau Foundation, RSJ (Senegal), ASOGEN (Guatemala), FAWE (Kenya), and IPBF (Burkina Faso) into our partnership. And we continued to grow the global footprint of our Secretariat team.  As a team that has always been globally dispersed and remote, we were fortunate to have learned hard lessons about how to work together when you can’t “be” together even before the pandemic hit.

The uncertainty and insecurity left at the end of 2020 is already spreading into 2021 and will continue to do so for many years to come.  Without concerted efforts to build back better post-pandemic, we risk setting back gains in equality for girls and women.

Data shows us that gender equal societies are happier, healthier, wealthier, and more prosperous, not to mention fairer.  May 2021 bring more promise to girls and women worldwide.

Happy New Year.

Alison Holder

Director

Equal Measures 2030

We were extremely honoured to be among the finalists for the UN's SDG Action Awards in 2020, a testament to the collaborative efforts of our team and partners. In the words of Melinda Gates, “Too often, women and girls are invisible, with no data or sexist data on issues that disproportionately affect their lives”. We appreciate the recognition of our unique “global to local” cross-sector partnership that connects data and evidence with advocacy and action, helping to fuel progress towards gender equality and the transformational agenda of the SDGs. 

Amidst the global challenges that took the world by storm, we remain thankful for our partners, supporters, allies and all that we were able to achieve together. To kick off 2021, we took stock and looked back at some of our highlights from the past year. 

It's official! We have opened applications for our data journalism fellowship and are inviting 15 aspiring data journalists from India and Kenya who identify as women or gender minorities to apply for this amazing opportunity to learn data storytelling using Tableau. The fellowship will be run in collaboration with Tableau Foundation.

EM2030 works to ensure that frontline changemakers and advocates have the funding, capacity, connections, and actionable data they need to effectively influence policymakers and decision makers in their communities and countries.

We are now on Instagram

Follow @equal2030