Training in Gender Statistics for Turks and Caicos Islands

Background

The Department of Gender Affairs (DGA) of Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) is the country’s national machinery for gender equality.

The Department also promotes equity and advancement opportunities for women, men and children of the TCI through the formulation and implementation of evidence-based policies and programmes that contribute to social justice and the elimination of prejudice and discrimination of every form. In implementing its mandate, DGA works collaboratively with other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the Government of TCI. The department also relies on data, especially sex-disaggregated data to inform its policy recommendations to the government and programming of services to citizens. Therefore, DGA is keenly interested in improving its capacity, and those of the MDAs, to collect and analyze sex-disaggregated data, a critical component in advancing gender equality and sustainable development in the TCI.

Towards strengthening its capacity to fulfil its mission and vision, DGA requested for technical assistance from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Subregional Headquarters for the Caribbean in institutional strengthening of its data collection strategies. DGA’s aim is to strengthen the territory's gender-disaggregated data collection capacity by improving the technical capacity of the Gender Machinery and the Department of Statistics as key stakeholders and staff of other MDAs within the country’s national statistical system.

To this end, DGA and ECLAC Caribbean held a virtual consultation with the executive management and technical officers of MDAs on 30 January 2024. The consultation, which was attending by 40 officials of the Government of The TCI provided useful information to ECLAC in establishing the level of statistical capacity within the public sector and helped the regional commission to envision the type of capacity building training that would be most beneficial to the country in strengthening its gender statistics capacity.

Therefore, in collaboration with DGA, ECLAC Caribbean will provide training in gender statistics through a hybrid approach that involves webinars and in-person workshops.  These virtual and face-to-face sessions will cover the following modules:

1. Introduction to basic statistics
2. Introduction to gender statistics
3. Gender data collection and analysis
4. Data dissemination and visualization
5. Use of data in gender-responsive policy formulation
6. International standards and best practices in gender statistics
7. Capacity building in gender data collection

Rationale

The importance of gender-responsive policy making and implementation cannot be over-emphasized. Gender-responsive policies represent a set of tools for ensuring equity and contribute to promoting the Leave No One Behind promise of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. An essential input in gender-responsive policy formulation is quality, sex-disaggregated data. Ensuring that everyone who handles, analyzes, utilizes or disseminates data has the requisite capacity in gender statistics is therefore crucial to effective policy making. 

Format

Modules 1-4 will be delivered virtually through webinars while modules 5-7 will be delivered in an in-person workshop. Participants in the training are expected to participate in these webinars and workshop to receive a certificate. There will be four half-day webinars organized on 17 & 18 September 2024 . The materials for each webinar will be provided to participants after they have registered for the training. Homework comprising of exercises on the 4 modules will be given at the end of Module 4. These exercises will be due two weeks before the in-person workshop and participants will receive feedback on their submission from the training facilitators during the in-person workshop. Homework submitted by training participants will also help in designing TCI-specific examples and case studies for subsequent modules. Only those who participated in the webinars and completed all exercises will be able to participate in the 3-day in-person workshop to be held in Turks and Caicos in November 2024.

Expected outputs

The main expected output of this technical assistance is to equip the gender machinery and the public sector of TCI with enhanced capacity in gender statistics.