UN Women’s evaluation of gender in the SDGs: What’s the role for the CGIAR?

Abstract

Key messagesThe UN Women’s 2018 report on gender equality within the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development underscores the importance of monitoring the SDGs in order to: translate global commitment to results, foster public debate and democratic decision-making, and strengthen accountability for actions or omissions.The report serves to demonstrate the inadequacies of the current Global Indicator Framework for gender responsive monitoring of the SDGs. It highlights that women and girls face multiple forms of disadvantage and calls for recognizing, redistributing and reducing the paid and unpaid burdens women face, so as to overcome structural barriers to gender equality.The CGIAR gender research community is uniquely positioned to contribute by tracking progress against the goals, identifying achievements and gaps, and highlighting implementation challenges. However, the report does not significantly showcase CGIAR gender research and research publications.Looking forwards, the CGIAR can play a bigger role in the 2030 Agenda by leveraging its globally comparative, high-impact and innovative research to contribute to global and national efforts to monitor the SDGs. This will necessitate seizing opportunities to inform future reports as well as consolidating and harmonizing our research and findings to have a bigger voice and effect