Opening remarks for Launch of the second edition of ASEAN Gender Outlook: Achieving the SDGs for all and leaving no woman or girl behind

[As delivered]

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Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. 

On behalf of UN Women, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the ASEAN Committee on Women, ASEAN Community Statistical SystemCommittee and ASEAN Secretariat for their continued partnership and interest in advancing data and statistics for tracking the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the gender perspective. 

I would like to reiterate that ‘gender equality’ is at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs as well as the ASEAN Vision 2025. 

The adoption of the ASEAN Strategic Framework for Gender Mainstreaming 2021 demonstrates the increasing recognition on these mutually reinforcing synergies. 

Today, we are pleased to be able to share with you a ‘sneak peek’ of the 2nd edition of the ASEAN Gender Outlook as one of the great examples to demonstrate ASEAN to promote ‘increased access to quality data to support evidence-based decision making’

Over the past two decades, ACW and ACWC in partnership with UN Women has been advocating for gender mainstreaming across all three ASEAN Community Pillars. 

Under the Peace and Security Community Pillar, the ASEAN Regional Plan of Action on Women, Peace and Security shows a concrete approach to gender mainstreaming in peace and security sectors;  

Under the socio-cultural community pillar, the current ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response Work Programme for the first time incorporates the principle of gender and social inclusion with increasing recognition of the use of gender data and statistics for disaster prevention, prevention and response. 

Similarly, we see greater interest and commitment to integrate gender in the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Pillar to guide the Post-2025 agenda.  

Gender data and statistics is a critical building block for gender mainstreaming. It is critical to capture progress and challenges over the past five years to inform concrete policy action in the Post-2025 ASEAN Community Vision. 

Excellencies, distinguished guests, 

Achieving the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs with the promise of leaving no one behind is the ambitious goal for all of us. As we are at the halfway point towards the finished line, there is no doubt that acceleration of progress to meet these goals must be a priority. 

But, the question is ‘how’ can we work better to stretch our resources and funding more effectively to those need them the most?

Generating more and better gender data and evidence to inform policy decision making is key to address those questions. This cannot be more critical as ASEAN  shapes the post-2025 ASEAN Community Vision. 

While we will hear more from my colleague Sara about the substance and key messages from this second edition of the ASEAN Gender Outlook, allow me to highlight the process and salient features of this report.

Firstly, ASEAN has taken full ownership of this report with great interest andsupport from multiple ASEAN sectoral bodies and national statistical offices under the leadership of ACW. With the support of the ASEAN secretariat and UN Women, it also went through extensive consultation and review processes within ASEAN. 

We are very pleased to collaborate with Malaysia (as the next incoming Chair of ASEAN in 2025) to initiate the launch of this publication, which is a pre-cursor to the high-level side event of the UN General Assembly to showcase the ASEAN Gender Outlook marking a midpoint review of the SDGs in New York on 27 September.

Secondly, the report provides new perspectives to shed light particularly on the SDG goals have significant gaps in gender data/analysis. It uses multi-level disaggregation analysis to assess who are the groups of women and girls that are at risk of being left behind. 

Last but not least, the second edition of the ASEAN Gender Outlook points out key opportunities to overcome these challenges with particular focus on investing in the production and use of gender data and statistics. 

There has been a significant progress to promote the availability of gender data and evidence across economic and social dimensions of sustainable development, even though we have found that gender data for many environmental indicators for the SDGs are still missing. 

Excellencies, distinguish guests, ladies and gentlemen, 

We commend the Government of Malaysia and ASEAN in demonstrating a strong commitment to achieving the Agenda 2030 and the SDGs. 

In our collective endeavour to advance gender equality, you can count on UN Women to continue being a steadfast partner. This report is just one important milestone along the journey of long-term collaboration to promote gender data and statistics to inform inclusive policy decision making and track progress towards the SDGs in the next decade. 

We look forward to strengthening a partnership with ASEAN to advance South-South and Triangular Cooperation to promote gender data and statistics for monitoring progress towards the SDGs and fill in data gaps in response to the demands of ASEAN Member States. 

For instance, UN Women has recently worked with Cambodia and Indonesia to engender environmental statistics with new data collection and analysis, we are very encouraged that it will help provide more concrete evidence and solution for effective policy and decision making. 

Overcoming deeply entrenched gender inequality would transform the world, empowering everyone to realise their full potential and live a life of dignity. 

We very much hope this publication will provide invaluable evidence to support ASEAN member states in accelerating progress on gender equality and sustainable development for all.

Thank you.