By 
The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN WOMEN), grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women’s rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality are translated into action throughout the world. It provides strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States’ priorities and efforts while building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.
From a gender perspective, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a significant step forward from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), covering for the first-time core areas of the feminist agenda. The Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), created under the auspices of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), has identified a robust set of 230 unique indicators to monitor progress in achieving the SDGs. Overall, a quarter of these indicators explicitly or implicitly address gender equality. The challenges of effectively monitoring the SDGs from a gender perspective cannot be overstated. Of the 14 proposed indicators to monitor SDG 5, there are only 4 (referred to as Tier I indicators) for which internationally accepted standards for measurement exist and for which data are regularly collected by most countries. Lack of statistics in these areas arises both from a failure to prioritize gender equality in data collection and from a lack of resources. Gender statistics are rarely prioritized in data collection and the resources devoted to them, both at the national and international level, remain grossly inadequate. The demand for greater support for statistics will only increase as countries begin to implement the SDGs.
To support member states in implementing the 2030 Agenda, UN Women’s Flagship Programme Initiative Making Every Woman and Girl Count (MEWGC) aims to affect a radical shift in the production, availability, accessibility and use of quality data and statistics on key aspects of gender equality and women’s empowerment.
The program has three objectives: (i) Promoting an enabling environment by putting in place a supportive and well-coordinated policy environment to ensure gender-responsive localization and effective monitoring of the SDGs; (ii) Increasing data production by removing technical barriers and constraints to ensure that quality, comparable and regular gender statistics are produced to monitor the implementation of national policies and meet reporting commitments under the SDGs; and (iii) Improving data accessibility by ensuring that the data produced are widely available and used effectively by different players with sufficient capacities to understand, analyze and use them to inform advocacy, research, policies and programmes and to monitor progress on the SDGs.
In Kenya, Making Every Woman and Girl Count (MEWGC) is an initiative meant to strengthen the capacity of the Government and Non-State Actors to produce and use gender statistics in order to inform and monitor the implementation of Kenya’s gender-related commitments in the 2030 Agenda.
The Programme Specialist – Gender Statistics will report to the Team Leader-Democratic Governance and work under the overall guidance and direction of the Team Leader- Democratic Governance. MEWGC is a global flagship programme of UN Women, the Programme Specialist – Gender Statistics will work with the Regional MEWGC representative and the UN Women HQ MEWGC programme staff. The Programme Specialist – Gender and Statistics will contribute to ensuring the effective planning, implementing, managing and reporting of the gender and statistics MEWGC project in Kenya.
Reporting to the Team Leader – Democratic Governance, the Programme Specialist exercises overall responsibility for planning, implementing, and managing UN Women interventions under his/her portfolio. She/he works in close collaboration with the programme and operations team, UN Women HQ staff, the UN Women regional office, Government officials, multi and bi-lateral donors and civil society to ensure successful UN Women programme implementation under this portfolio.
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