Bridging Gaps: Essential Gender Data Toolkit for Humanitarian Action

 Humanitarian crises are fluid and dynamic, which makes data collection a challenge especially where partner capacity is limited. Even if gender data is a priority, it is still just one priority in a sea of other competing, very urgent issues that need to be addressed. Gender data itself is not typically well understood in the humanitarian space; the term is often limited to an understanding of sex and age disaggregated data and may be thought of only as a requirement rather than a tool to be used to strengthen programming. Although most agencies make provision for the collection of sex and age disaggregated data (SADD), it does not always happen, or it is collected inconsistently.

This toolkit is aimed at providing an accessible compendium of resources available for the production and use of gender data in humanitarian settings. It is tailored to build capacity and provide guidance to governments, civil society organizations (CSO), humanitarians working with data, information managers, managers, decision makers, statisticians, and users of gender statistics. The tools contained in the toolkit can be used in support of key humanitarian planning and operational processes, including advocacy, strategy and policy formulation, planning, resource allocation, monitoring, and evaluation.

This toolkit has been compiled following a recommendation of the 8th Africa Gender Statistics Forum (AGSF23), which took place in Morocco in November 2023.

The toolkit is produced under the leadership of UN Women with funding from the Government of Italy through Women Count, UN Women’s global gender data and statistics flagship programme.