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Improve data collection on women, says UN.

Article Excerpt
Much more needs to be done to collect data crucial in planning and formulating policies and programmes for improving women's lives, a recently released United Nations report revealed.

The World's Women 2005: Progress in Statistics, emphasises the need to monitor the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action towards the Millennium Development Goals. It examined data from 204 countries and found little progress in the reporting of official national statistics worldwide. "To a great extent," the report says, "countries that reported data thirty years ago continue to do so today. Similarly, many countries that did not report thirty years ago still do not report."

Mixed results

Noting that quality statistics are "crucial" to guiding policy, it reports mixed results in the capacity of countries to produce and report sex-disaggregated data.

Jose Antonio Ocampo, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic Social Affairs, said sex-disaggregated data were mostly available for population (albeit with infrequent information), education enrolment, and participation in the labour market. Information on births and deaths was severely lacking.

Ocampo also noted that very little information exists worldwide on the issue of violence against women...

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