La Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres is a pacifist, feminist organization working with over 300 women’s organizations to promote a feminist vision of peace and non-violent civil resistance for gender equality.

La Ruta’s journey to becoming DDA champions  

La Ruta had historically relied on qualitative evidence to tell the stories of the impact of conflict on women and girls in Colombia. In partnership with EM2030 since 2017, la Ruta has worked to expand their use of quantitative data as a complement to qualitative. La Ruta now integrates data and evidence (including the EM2030 Index) into every aspect of their advocacy work, from local budgeting processes to national policymaking. 

Today, la Ruta is a leading voice in Colombia on the close links between the Colombian Peace Agreement and the SDGs and pursues advocacy on these commitments in tandem. 

La Ruta’s Regional Coordinator in Quindío region said, “Thanks to the Equal Measures 2030 project we reinforced our skills around data-driven advocacy. It helped us to understand the importance of data and evidence to ask for accountability for women’s rights, to go beyond reading data only as numbers but as a political tool.” 

 Asociación Generando Equidad, Liderazgo y Oportunidades (ASOGEN) is an association of women in Guatemala using a human rights and feminist approach to shine a light on and work to end violence against women.  

Addressing violence against women through DDA  

ASOGEN joined EM2030 in 2020. With the support of EM2030, ASOGEN has trained over 100 local gender advocates to access and use data to strengthen their work on the elimination of violence and the achievement of gender equality in line with the SDGs. ASOGEN combines localized work with survivors of violence and the justice sector in the department of Chimaltenango with national and global level advocacy. The organization has used data to influence national laws on femicide and fight to increase budgets for the country’s network of shelters protecting women and girls against gender-based violence.  At the local level, ASOGEN leads the security roundtable in Chimaltenango, a group that brings together stakeholders in the justice sector to prevent and respond to cases of gender-based violence.

ASOGEN has built a reputation as a reliable source of data and has received multiple requests for data and DDA training from these institutions.

Everything is interlinked, we cannot work at the individual and local level without also working at the national level. We have big ambitions […] we aim to change the whole narrative around violence against women. To do that, we need evidence about the current situation so people can see and understand the sheer magnitude of the problems.

Alva Gordillo Aguirre, ASOGEN’s Deputy Director

Society for Health Alternatives (SAHAJ) is a civil society organization (CSO) focused on promoting social accountability for women’s, adolescents’ and children’s health and education.  

Influencing the future policymakers of India  

SAHAJ is a long-time evidencebased advocate and actor for the rights to health and education, especially for marginalized groups in India. The partnership with EM2030 since 2017 has built on this legacy, enabling SAHAJ to make stronger links between their work and the SDG framework commitments at national and global levels.  

SAHAJ has made significant strides in socializing and localizing the SDGs and associated gender commitments through training grassroots of CSOs and national and sub-national bureaucrats.  

A large academy training and assessing would-be civil servants in India created an instructional video using SAHAJ resources to teach these future decisionmakers about the importance of the SDGs and gender equality. This content has combined views of over 250,000. SAHAJ has used SDG framing for sub-national data sets to create scorecards on key issues of health and education in three states in India. Alongside trained data-driven advocates, they use these scorecards to influence state- and local-level policymakers about ongoing gaps in the fulfilment of girls’ and women’s rights.

As a key actor on the measurement of gendered dimensions of the SDGs, SAHAJ contributed to NITI Aayog (the government agency responsible for implementing the SDGs) efforts to create a new national SDG Gender Index for India. They also provided data on gaps in access to family planning which were used by the Feminist Policy Collective in their advocacy on the 2021-2022 Union Budget for India. 

KAPAL Perempuan aims to build a robust women’s movement for gender equality through developing a network of social activists and female leaders.

Ending child marriage

KAPAL Perempuan have long worked with networks of women’s groups to gather data related to gender equality. With support from EM2030, KAPAL Perempuan has focused specifically on raising the national legal age of marriage for girls, running campaigns at the local level to influence decisionmakers and engaging directly with policymakers in the national government using qualitative and quantitative data to tell the stories of child marriage survivors.

In response to collective advocacy from KAPAL and partners, the Indonesian parliament voted overwhelmingly to raise the legal age of marriage for girls from 16 to 19 years (to match the legal age of marriage for boys). This is a huge legal win for teenage girls, allowing them to continue secondary education, for example, and to have greater control over their lives.

Data is the core of the struggle,” says Misiyah Misiyah, Director of KAPAL Perempuan. “With no data, we end up in a futile argument. But when we have solid data about gender issues, either quantitative or qualitative, we can use that as a tool to push government to give their protection to women.

An EM2030 partner since 2017, GROOTS Kenya is a national movement-building organization, comprised of over 3,500 women-led grassroots organizations. For over 27 years, GROOTS Kenya has trained grassroots advocates to use data and evidence to hold governments to account. 

GROOTSmart – the Gender Data Dashboard 

KAPAL Perempuan have long worked with networks of women’s groups to gather data related to gender equality. With support from EM2030, KAPAL Perempuan has focused specifically on raising the national legal age of marriage for girls, running campaigns at the local level to influence decisionmakers and engaging directly with policymakers in the national government using qualitative and quantitative data to tell the stories of child marriage survivors.

GROOTS Kenya is recognized nationally and globally as a respected gender data expert. GROOTSmart, their Gender Data Dashboard, is an online visualization tool for gender data in Kenya, used extensively by grassroots advocates and county level policymakers to inform key policies and budgets. 

The dashboard breaks down key issues from the national to county level, from women’s political representation to family planning, and from education to unpaid domestic care work. This at-a-glance resource is readily accessible, helping to make the case to policy makers and other stakeholders. Recognition for this work has enabled GROOTS to develop a close partnership with UN Women and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics.

GROOTS has strategically influenced the development of key statistics products, including national guidelines on the use of citizengenerated data. They are also involved in the first survey in Kenya to measure women’s unpaid care work. Increasingly, GROOTS has been engaging in regional and global spaces (e.g. COP27), leveraging Index data and advocacy messaging to promote and advance women’s access to use and control of productive resources (land, finance, technology) and to promote grassroots women’s engagement in climate solutions and resilience building. 

The confidence, reach, and profile of the project team has exploded to a level where GROOTS Kenya’s data work is often referenced, and the staff called upon to train and support other CSOs and professionals. Because of EM2030, GROOTS Kenya has received recognition by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, UN Women, the World Bank, the media, CSOs and the private sector for investing in gender data.

Fridah Gituku, Executive Director, GROOTS Kenya

Réseau Siggil Jigéen (RSJ) promotes and protects women’s rights in Senegal, working through its network of 16 member organizations primarily on sexual and reproductive health, youth leadership, literacy and microfinance.  

RSJ’s journey to becoming DDA champions

With support from EM2030, RSJ has, through a data-based advocacy approach with local authorities and private sector companies, influenced resource mobilization, increasing financing for reproductive health in three communes of Senegal. Through its DDA committee, composed of 20 DDA training alumni from a wide range of civil society groups in Senegal; RSJ promotes the use of data in the work and advocacy efforts of Senegalese policymakers, civil society and media. 

RSJ has supported online campaigns that have reached over 50,000 people and engaged policymakers throughout the Generation Equality Forum process, an initiative to accelerate investment and implementation on gender equality convened by UN Women. 

As a result of these efforts, RSJ was invited by the Women’s Ministry’s Directorate for Equity and Gender Equality of Senegal to contribute to the development of the action plan, and implementation of the recommendations that came out of the Generation Equality Forum 

FEMNET is a regional Pan African Feminist membership-based nongovernmental organization (NGO). It was set up in 1988 to share information, experiences, ideas and strategies among African women’s NGOs to strengthen the capacity of women to participate effectively in the development of the continent. This is done through advocacy, capacity building, communication and networking.  

Using data to engage regional and continental stakeholders  

FEMNET is recognized and respected across Africa and the world as a PanAfrican Feminist network that ensures that the voices of African women are amplified and their needs and aspirations are prioritized in key policy dialogues and outcomes.

Data has been instrumental in framing FEMNET’s contributions across regional and global spaces. 

 These spaces have included Women’s Affairs Ministers Meetings, Gender is My Agenda Campaign (GIMAC) meetings at the African Union, Regional Economic Communities engagements with the African Union, Commission on the Status of Women in 2022 (CSW66), and the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27). They have addressed a wide range of issues including gender equality, women’s political participation, climate justice and economic justice. To inform speeches delivered by key policymakers, FEMNET has used data alongside demands and recommendations made by African women and girls themselves. 

ARROW is a regional non-profit women’s rights organization established in 1993 and holds a consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN. ARROW works with more than 90 partners across 16 priority countries in Asia-Pacific and is committed to championing gender equality, the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and young people, especially with regards to access to services. It does this through advocacy, monitoring evidence generation, strategic partnerships and mobilizing communities.  

Championing sexual and reproductive health and rights  

ARROW is well-known in the region and globally as a leading network committed to advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Monitoring and evidence-based research for better advocacy has been instrumental to ARROW’s approach to ensuring accountability.

Following ARROW’s partnership with EM2030, the network has used and integrated the Index data and language around demand for quality gender data in key written and oral interventions at the Commission on the Status of Women, the UN Highlevel Political Forum and in regular monitoring efforts around SDG 3 (good health and well-being) and 5 (gender equality).  

In collaboration with EM2030, ARROW has designed DDA training for youth advocates across the region through a range of ARROW supported programmes and partnerships. 

As a network of around 200 women’s organizations and activists across 14 countries, CLADEM promotes women’s rights by monitoring international treaties, proposing legislative reforms, undertaking research and training, and organizing group action where needed.  

Defending women’s rights through regional solidarity, data and the law  

CLADEM has worked at the regional level and with its CLADEM allies in 14 countries to combine data from the EM2030 Index and Mira que te Miro (a regional tracker of sexual and reproductive health and rights commitments). They created one regional and 13 country factsheets and used these to influence events and processes including the 2020 Regional Conference on Women in the Latin America and Caribbean region, Commission on the Status of Women in 2021 (CSW65), Generation Equality Forum, and the Latin America and Caribbean Forum on Sustainable Development.

Building on their long-standing campaign against forced pregnancy, CLADEM’s collaboration with EM2030 has helped them to combine their traditional focus on anecdotal examples of specific cases of adolescent births with wider quantitative data showing that births in the age group 10-14 have increased in recent years.  

CLADEM have been able to better link political advocacy and data, increasing their presence and outreach in national and regional spaces and with the media.  

In 2022, CLADEM and EM2030 collaborated on a virtual event with advocates from Brazil in advance of the recent presidential election. The event presented data on Brazil’s backsliding on gender equality during the Bolsonaro administration and potential strategies for collective DDA to reverse this trend in the coming years.