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 Melinda Gates

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announces $80m commitment to close gender data gaps

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will commit $80 million over the next three years to close gender data gaps and help accelerate progress for women and girls around the world.

Melinda Gates, a co-chair of the foundation, announced this at the Women Deliver conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.  

“By adopting the SDGs, the world agreed to achieve gender equality by 2030. But we cannot close the gender gap without first closing the data gap," she said. 

“We simply don’t know enough about the barriers holding women and girls back, nor do we have sufficient information to track progress against the promises made to women and girls. We are committed to changing that by investing in better data, policies and accountability,” she added.

Areas to receive support

The Gates Foundation’s new $80-million commitment will support efforts that fill critical gender data gaps, including knowing how much time women and girls spend on unpaid work around the world and what implications this has on their life chances and choices, such as completing education, getting jobs or starting businesses.

It will also support efforts to improve the accuracy and reliability of data collection which can reveal on a large scale who owns assets like land, property or credit and further support actions to equip decision makers with more timely and clearer evidence about programmes and interventions that are working and those that are not, so they can be redesigned quickly and more effectively.

Sustainable development

The Executive Director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, said: “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims ‘to leave no one behind’. 

“To bring all women and girls to the finishing line in 2030 at the same time as everyone else, we must be able to target them and their needs and see what progress we are making.

Statement of principles

Alongside the Gates Foundation’s commitment, partners across governments, non-profit and philanthropic organisations have also agreed upon a new statement of principles regarding gender data and their importance for accelerating development outcomes.

They observed that through reliable data, women and girls’ lives could become visible and counted, helping to inform  programming  and holding leaders to account.  

The partners agreed that if the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were to be reached by 2030, the world must advance its knowledge about women and girls’ lives and livelihoods, their welfare and well-being and their contributions to their communities, countries and economies.

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