On the 4^th of November, the CIB working group organised a webinar on using data to advance gender equality in international programming. Experts from Bosnia, the United Kingdom and from United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) provided useful insights on how data and solid monitoring and evaluation can help improve gender equality at local level. Pascal Lavoie, director of programs at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, was present as the moderator of the webinar.

Gender equality: a crucial topic on the CIB agenda

The topic of gender equality has been on the CIB agenda for a couple of years now, following a growing interest in this topic by beneficiaries, implementing organisations and the (international) donor community. The CIB working group has organised various workshops and webinars on this topic, including one of women leadership earlier this year. The topic of this webinar was chosen as many CIB member organisations are interested in combining monitoring & evaluation methods and skills with the topic of gender equality; it becomes somewhat easier to work on this topic, if you have good data and evidence.

Gendered impact of COVID-19

The topic of gender equality has only increased in importance in the current COVID-19 context. Sarah Vieux (UCLG) shared insightful and informative information of some of the gendered impacts that have arisen from the pandemic. Sarah’s presentation highlighted how the monitoring of women’s representation and participation at decision making levels has direct consequences on the efforts to improve gender equality regarding the COVID-19 crisis and its impacts.

Difficulties in putting gender on the local agenda

Marija Risteska, an expert in the field of (disaggregated) data collection and gender, highlighted the difficulties of putting gender on the agenda of local governments, further reinforcing the necessity of webinars as such, to shed more light on this topic. She also showed how important interpretation of data is, based on an example from Macedonia. The data she presented showed how there are large disparities between different municipalities, in regard to male vs. female Covid-19 infection rates. She illustrated different explanations for why this is the case, as well as possible ways of conducting qualitative analysis to further examine such gender-based disparities.

Using disaggregated data for (local) decision-making

Tom Aston, and independent consultant specialised in participatory methods for monitoring and evaluation, guided us through different methods to gather and analyse gender data, including outcome harvesting and Most Significant Change, with examples from Bangladesh and Tanzania. Find out more on outcome mapping here.

Background materials

The PowerPoint presentation of the webinar can be found here.

The experts and participants shared many additional resources during the webinar; those can be found here:

• CEMR Study «Women in politics: Local and European Trends» English and French.
• Draft resolution from the Congress of local and regional authorities of the Council of Europe on fighting sexism in politics at local/regional level.
• A guide developed by the Congress of the Council of Europe on preventing and combatting sexism at local level.
• Video by the city of Rabat: a safe city free of violence for women and girls
• UCLG’s YouTube channel with key speeches from the Live learning session on COVID-19 and gender: video.
• Publication by Metropolis: «Safety and Public Space : Mapping metropolitan gender policies» on metropolitan best experiences and gender indicators to combat sexual violence against women and girls in public space.