International Day of the Girl Child
The event which focuses on the theme ““Girls’ Progress = Goals’ Progress: A Global Girl Data Movement”.
Why International Day of the Girl Child?
October 11, 2012 was the first day the girl child was recognized. International Day of the Girl Child is an international observance day declared by the United Nations; it is also called the Day of the Girl and the International Day of the Girl (IDG). The observation supports more opportunities for girls and increases awareness of gender inequality faced by girls worldwide based upon their gender. This inequality includes areas such as right and access to education, nutrition, legal rights, medical care, and the protection from discrimination, violence against women and child marriage.
Objective of IDG 2016
- Enhance national capacity and systems to collect, analyze and disseminate gender data across the age spectrum to improve statistics on gender-based violence, adolescent pregnancy and reproductive health, informal employment, entrepreneurship, unpaid work, and other priorities for girls and young women.
- Disaggregate data on boys and girls and along other dimensions (e.g., ethnicity, age, income-level, disability, location, migration status, etc.) to better understand exactly which children and adolescents are most disadvantaged and where.
- Improve data collection efforts for often undercounted groups – such as data on sexual violence against younger adolescent girls (10-14).
- Harness “big data” and technology to close the gender data gaps in areas where progress for girls is often difficult to measure due to issue sensitivity or the huge data volume required, including through analysis of girls’ opinions on key development issues on social media.
- Remedy the gender bias in existing measurement tools, particularly biases that exclude the most vulnerable. For example, improved data collection tools can prevent under-reporting of violence against girls and under counting of their births and deaths.
- Pilot and scale-up innovative real-time data platforms to monitor and adapt programming for girls, to ensure girls are active participants in program design and that programs achieve the most impactful results.
