ICRW And Partners Call for Stronger Global Targets to Improve the Lives of Adolescent Girls

Article Date

04 June 2015

Article Author

Erin Kelly

Media Contact

Anne McPherson

Vice President, Global Communications email [email protected]

This week, the UN released a draft of the political outcome document it will adopt this September when the General Assembly convenes to adopt the world’s next set of development goals. It sets out a framework of 17 goals and 169 targets that are likely to be the world’s next set of development goals, and proposes several points regarding how global progress will be measured. 

As the world’s leading research institute working at the intersection of gender and development, ICRW knows that what gets measured gets done.

As such, ICRW has joined with 14 global organizations to call on decision-makers at the United Nations to ensure adolescent girls’ unique needs and priorities are represented in the goals and that any tools to measure progress ensure the most vulnerable girls around the world benefit from such progress and are able to exercise their rights.

The new global goals, called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS), will replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are set to expire at the end of 2015. The MDGs were successful in some areas, but progress has been uneven, with disparities between countries and with varying degrees of success for each of the eight goals. For instance, while maternal mortality has decreased sharply at a global level, many countries have seen far slower declines, and there are still far too many new HIV infections, most particularly among girls and young women. More women are exercising power in parliaments worldwide, yet the gender gap in employment persists. And while more girls than ever before are enrolled in primary school, ensuring girls transition to, stay in and gain meaningful skills in secondary school remains a challenge. Further, adolescent girls’ unique needs and priorities were largely left out of the MDGs altogether, something that must change if we are to make significant progress toward global development moving forward.

ICRW is joining with other leading global institutions to ensure that adolescent girls don’t fall through the cracks yet again.

To guarantee that girls’ needs are accounted for, we must set concrete goals for what we seek to improve about their lives and set up appropriate measures to gauge our progress. For too long, the global community has measured only what’s been easy to measure, which can miss critical components of the myriad complex factors affecting girls’ lives.

To ensure we’re measuring what’s most important to girls around the world, ICRW, in collaboration with other global institutions, is calling for relevant and quality statistics that are, at a very minimum, disaggregated by gender, in five-year age bands, income, disability, marital status, race and ethnicity. Additionally, we are pushing governments to commit to funding, collecting and preparing these statistics as a matter of standard practice.

Specifically, ICRW and our partners are calling on governments to:

  • Measure whether laws or policies discriminate against pregnant or married girls in school and measure the number of girls who leave school due to marriage/early pregnancy to assess how well the global community is working to eliminate disparities in education;
  • Measure the number of adolescent girls (ages 10-14 and 15-19) giving birth, in order to assess progress toward reducing maternal mortality;
  • Measure percentage of girls ages 20-24 who were married before age 15 and before 18 and the percentage of girls/women 10-29 years-old who have undergone female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in order to measure progress to eliminate harmful traditional practices; and
  • Measure the number of countries that have enforceable regulations to allow women and girls to access sexual and reproductive health services without the authorization of a parent or spouse.

The full list of proposed indicators to measure progress toward this new set of global goals can be found here.