Bangkok--19 Dec--ESCAP
Secretary Hillary Clinton and Mayor MichaelBloomberg, representing Data2X, an international initiative to close gendergaps, announced its partnership with the United Nations Economic and SocialCommission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in New York on Monday.
The partnership will ensure that regional efforts to improve civilregistration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems during the “Asian andPacific CRVS Decade (2015-2024)” contribute to gender equality by givingparticular attention to the challenges faced by women and girls to gettinga legal identity and being included in official statistics.
It is estimated that 135 million children under the age of five in Asia andthe Pacific have not had their birth registered, and are thus unable toprove who they or their parents are. These children, as well as the manypeople of other ages in the region without a legal identity, are formallynon-existent. Some of the challenges they may face include being unable togo to school or visit a doctor and being restricted from voting or owningproperty. Furthermore, they are less likely to have a nationality and aremore vulnerable in natural disasters and emergencies, since there is noofficial trace of their existence.
Hailing the announcement as an important milestone for the “Get Every Onein the Picture” regional initiative, Mr. Shun-ichi Murata, ESCAP DeputyExecutive Secretary noted: “Leaving no one behind will be a core tenet ofthe post-2015 development agenda, and providing every man, woman, girl andboy a legal identity, and including them in official statistics that shouldguide the decisions we make, are absolutely critical to achieving this aim.This partnership with Data2x is a significant step in that direction.”
The announcement comes on the heels of the first Ministerial Conference onCRVS in Asia and the Pacific that ESCAP convened in November as part of the“Get Every One in the Picture” initiative to improve CRVS in the region,during which governments of ESCAP member States made historic commitmentsof universal civil registration of births and deaths, legal documentationfor all and better vital statistics based on civil registration, all by theend of the Asian and Pacific CRVS Decade in 2024.
The ESCAP-Data2x partnership will mainstream the gender dimension innational and regional CRVS plans as part of the “Get Every One in thePicture” initiative. Together, the partners will advocate for theimportance of CRVS and promote gender equality; analyze gender constraintsand opportunities such as incorporating marriage and divorce registrationinto national CRVS improvement plans and the importance, for development,of gender-sensitive data arising from CRVS systems; assess women’sawareness of and demand for individual legal identity; engage women’sorganizations to advocate for CRVS; and explore the use of informationtechnologies to improve reliability, coverage and awareness of the benefitsof CRVS systems.
Only four countries in the region, out of 58, have reliable systems forregistering deaths and recording medical causes of death, which arecritical systems for monitoring disease trends and producing evidence toinform public health and social policies. In the absence of these systems,estimates and models are used, based on surveys that are often expensiveand unsustainable, and, importantly, may not reflect the real situation,particularly among vulnerable population groups.
While there is no gender gap between the registration of the births of boysand girls, the lack of registration for women and girls can havedisproportionately damaging impacts. If a mother is not registered, it isfar less likely that her children will be registered; creating a viciouscycle of official ‘invisibility’ and contributing to persistent poverty,and marriage registration is a key tool for fighting early and forcedmarriage.
In addition, the CRVS systems that register births, deaths, marriages,divorces and adoptions in countries are widely recognized as the bestsource of data for monitoring maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy andpopulation dynamics, which are key evidence bases for policies that empowerand offer a better future for women and girls, especially because they aremore easily disaggregated.
About Data2X: Data2X, named for the power women have to multiply progressin their societies, works to advance gender equality and women’sempowerment by building partnerships to improve data collection and use toguide policy, better leverage investments, and spur global economic andsocial progress. The initiative, led by the United Nations Foundation, withsupport from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and ongoingcollaboration with the Office of Hillary Clinton, serves as a platform forpartners to work together for improved data collection and use. For moreinformation visit http://data2x.org