Giving Compass' Take:

• Eleanor Carey makes the case for collecting data as a way to empower rural women and girls by better understanding their situations. 

• What barriers exist in collecting data about rural women and girls? What gaps persist in global data? 

• Learn more about using data for WASH funding. 

Rural women and girls – and what is needed to ensure their progress – are the focus of this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). One area that must get attention is data. To improve the lives of women and girls in rural areas, we need to improve how we collect and produce data.

The UN Secretary-General’s report for CSW recognizes an important reciprocal relationship between data systems and development outcomes – a connection that has been underlined repeatedly since the Sustainable Development Goals called for an accompanying data revolution.

Improving data on rural women, therefore, has the potential to do two things: address key data gaps on a sizeable proportion of the world’s population and achieve positive development outcomes for one of the world’s most disadvantaged groups.

At Data2X, we need a new approach to data production – one that recognizes that we need more and better data because we currently systematically miss vital information on large sections of the population. If we don’t improve data production, the economic and social measures called for by the Secretary-General’s report and discussed at the Commission on the Status of Women will continue to leave rural women and girls behind.

We must also consider new methods of data collection to reach populations and collect data on topics that we previously considered out of our reach, as well as examine the technical minutiae of statistical classifications and the global guidance that governs data production.

Read more about why we need more data to help empower rural women by Eleanor Carey at United Nations Foundation.