As part of the UN-Women Uganda Women Count II project, EPRC will provide technical and leadership roles in building the capacity of data producers and users to bridge the gap in gender statistics in Uganda. Leveraging on the data produced by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBoS), and the capacity needs of different institutions, EPRC will develop a training and mentorship programme to train/mentor gender data users in data analysis and develop user-friendly gender knowledge products.
Specifically, EPRC aims to increase gender data demand by creating interventions along the data value chain, ranging from data compilation, analysis, and generation of knowledge products. EPRC will contribute to this by partnering with different data users and producers. Among them; Ministries, Departments and Agencies including Equal Opportunities Commission, Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, National Planning Authority, Office of the Prime Minister, Office of the President, Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Education and Sports, Ministry of Health, Development Partners, Local Governments and Civil Society Organizations. The highlighted MDAs are members of the National Gender and Equity Task Force, which is chaired by the Director Budget of the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED).
The initial project activities entail conducting a capacity needs assessment of gender data users and producers. This was done in a workshop where participants from targeted institutions were consulted on their capacity needs and other aspects critical to the design of the training and mentorship programme. The purpose of the workshop was to:
- Determine gender production and data use gaps.
- Determine the institutional capacity gaps in data generation and use.
- Establish individual staff capacity gaps and other challenges impeding effective use and generation of gender statistics on.
- Establish the frequency and accessibility of gender data generated by the institution.
To kick off the process, EPRC conducted a half-day capacity needs assessment workshop on 18th May 2023 to elicit actionable areas for the mentorship and training programme.
Dr. Ibrahim Kasirye welcomed the participants to the workshop on behalf of the Executive Director of EPRC. He gave a brief on what the project is about and mentioned that UN Women are the funders of this three-year project, and the workshop was the first in a series of workshops. He mentioned that the first UN Women Count project was implemented from 2019 to 2021 and EPRC undertook capacity building, analysis and organized dissemination events. He noted that EPRC used data from Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBoS) and was glad that the organizations that were part of the first UN Women Count were present in the workshop.
He stressed the need for continuous interface with the participants over the 3 years of the project, and said the workshop was to enable EPRC know the individual and organizations’ needs, what data exists in the system and what kind of analysis data users want.
Ms. Florence Nakazi said that the overall objective of the workshop was “To establish the capacities of gender data users and producers in gender data compilation, analysis, and generation of user-friendly gender knowledge products.”
She shared that the expected outcomes of the workshop were to acquire a deeper understanding of the capacity and knowledge gaps among gender data users and producers, prioritize the key capacity needs to form the basis of the training module development and identify the core institutions and individuals to contribute to the technical development and review of the gender statistics training manual.
Ms. Nakazi noted that the stakeholders in the data cycle were the data producers who collect, prepare and disseminate data; the data users who interpret and provide an in-depth analysis of the data; and the decision makers who use this data to inform policy.
She further explained that a data producer is an individual or entity that produces data through the steps of collection, preparation, and dissemination while, a data user is an individual or entity that takes existing summary reports, summary tables, and microdata sets and adds value to them by conducting analyses and interpreting them to answer questions and possibly make recommendations for action. A decision maker, on the other hand, is an individual or entity that applies the data/gender statistics to answer questions and inform decisions related to programs, policies, or investments.
She ended the presentation by stating that demand, expertise, availability, access, awareness, utility and trust are factors that must be present in order to achieve optimal gender data use.