Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso has seen ‘fast progress’ in its overall score on the SDG Gender Index, but it remains ‘very poor’ for 2020. While ‘fast progress’ has been made towards some SDGs, stagnation and declines in other key areas continue to hold back progress for girls and women.

Despite continued high poverty rates, Burkina Faso improved its Index score on SDG 1 on poverty by 5 points from 2015 to 2020 – its highest performance across the goals. This gain has been driven by progress on three indicators: women’s land rights (Ind. 1.3), women in poverty (Ind. 1.2) and women’s perceptions of their household income (Ind. 1.4).

The country’s greatest improvement has been seen on SDG 9 on innovation. However, even an 11-point gain between 2015 and 2020 has not been enough to lift the country above the ‘very poor’ category. The impressive progress has been driven by strong performances on every indicator for this goal – the score for women’s use of digital banking (Ind. 9.1) quadrupled, from 7 points to 30.

Upholding the right to education for all children, including girls (SDG 4), remains a significant challenge in Burkina Faso: despite a 6-point improvement since 2015, the country has only achieved a score of 46 (‘very poor’) on SDG 4. Particularly striking is a very low score on women attaining at least some secondary education (Ind. 4.4), which remains unchanged since 2015 with a score of just 6 points, the third lowest score on this indicator within the region and globally.

Of particular concern is Burkina Faso’s performance on SDG 5 on gender equality. Of the five indicators included under this goal in the Index, all but one have seen declines since 2015. Performance on two indicators related to women’s political participation have diverged with women in ministerial positions (Ind. 5.5) improving to 31 points (from 25 in 2015) and women in parliament (Ind 5.4) declining from 27 points to just 13 in 2020.