Led by Marianne Dahl – May 2017
The index was launched 26 October in New York, as a side-event to the 2017 UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security.
Women are at the heart of efforts to achieve sustainable peace through inclusion, justice, and security worldwide. This notion is explicit in the 2000 agenda established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The agenda urged all actors to increase women’s participation and incorporate gender perspectives in all UN peace and security efforts. In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council adopted resolutions on “Sustaining Peace,” which have been hailed as a transformative shift, from peacebuilding to sustaining peace as “a goal and a process to build a common vision of society.” The Sustaining Peace Agenda complements the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which recognizes the need to build inclusive, just, and peaceful societies for all.
Global indices are a way to assess and compare national progress against such goals, by distilling an array of complex information into a single number and ranking. While there are a growing number of global indices, none has brought together the three important dimensions of women’s inclusion, justice, and security. Gender indices are typically limited to indicators of inclusion, such as whether women complete secondary school or are in paid work. These aspects of inclusion are undoubtedly important, but they are incomplete in the absence of aspects of justice and security. It is surely misleading to focus exclusively on girls’ schooling where girls are not safe in their home or community. Likewise, traditional measures of security include an array of conflict indicators and assessments but invariably ignore systematic bias and discrimination against women and girls.
The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and the Peace Research Institute of Oslo have developed a new global index that captures both peace and security — and women’s inclusion and justice — for the first time ever. We draw on recognized international data sources to rank 153 countries around the world — covering more than 98 percent of the world’s population — in a way that focuses attention on key achievements and major shortcomings.
A primary goal of the Index is to accelerate progress on both the international Women, Peace and Security agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. Our Index is the first gender index to be developed in the framework of the 2030 Agenda, and reflects a shared vision that countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity. The Index will be updated every two years and will track progress ahead of the UN High-level Political Forum in 2019, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 20th anniversary of 2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The Index will have important utility for many sectors. Policymakers will be able to use its rankings to evaluate progress and set priorities, for the private sector it offers a tool for risk analysis, and civil society activists can celebrate achievements, highlight gaps, and hold their governments accountable for implementing the women, peace and security agenda.
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http://news.trust.org/item/20171025182608-lwp27/
Women’s Progress Index Shows Big Gaps Among & Inside Nations
By Ellen Wulfhorst
NEW YORK, Oct 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Iceland and Norway are the best countries for women, and Syria and Afghanistan the worst, according to an index to be released on Thursday that measures a host of global gains and failures.
Measuring and improving women’s lives is key to peace and security of nations as a whole, said the designers of the new index, the Peace Research Institute Oslo and the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS).
The Women Peace and Security Index ranked 153 countries, which account for more than 98 percent of the world’s population. Measuring everything from violence to cell phone use, it found big gaps both within and among the various nations.
“The condition of women and the denial of their rights is certainly an early indicator of future instability and conflict in a country,” Melanne Verveer, GIWPS executive director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
“If women are beat down, if their security situation is grim and deteriorating, if they are enormously marginalised, that is not a situation that is going to bode well for the country,” she said.
As is often the case in ranking women’s progress, the Middle East and North Africa scored at the bottom and Scandinavian countries dominated the top of the index, a copy of which was obtained by the Foundation ahead of its official release.
But in many countries, progress has been dramatically uneven, it showed.
In South Africa, women have made strides in education and political representation, but fewer than three in 10 feel safe walking at night and a quarter report violence at the hands of an intimate partner, it said.
“I’ve heard South African girls say to me, ‘I’m not safe in my home and I’m not safe walking to school and I’m not safe in the classroom,” said Verveer, who was the first U.S. ambassador at large for global women’s issues.
The index said that in Iran, most women have access to financial accounts and have more education than other women in the region.
Yet Iranian laws restrict married women from applying for passports, give husbands power to prevent their wives from working and do not protect women from domestic violence.
The index measured inclusion, such as education and employment; justice in terms of laws and discrimination; and security in terms of family and community violence.
One measure of inclusion was cellphone use, seen as critical for women in developing countries. Access to cellphones provides autonomy, self-confidence, safety and access to markets and job opportunities, it said.
Overall, the top countries for women were Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Slovenia, Spain, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Singapore, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom.
The United States ranked No. 22, in part due to having no legal mandate for equal pay nor legally guaranteed paid maternity leave, it said.
Also, women in the United States face a “unique crisis of lethal violence” due to domestic abuse and the widespread availability of guns, it said. The risk of homicide for women facing domestic violence increases fivefold when a gun is present, it said.
At the bottom of the list were Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Mali, Sudan, Niger, Lebanon, Cameroon and Chad.
One purpose of the index is to promote the Sustainable Development Goals, an agenda approved by the United Nations two years ago to be achieved by 2030, its designers said.
The global goals include universal education and an end to discrimination, conflict and poverty.
The index is to be updated every two years.
PRIO – https://www.prio.org/Projects/
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