As part of the campaign “UNiTE by 2030 to End Violence against Women”, in 2020 the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, urged all governments to make prevention and redress of gender-based violence against women and girls a key part of their national response plans to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. This call was answered by 146 Member and observer States, which expressed strong support for this goal and a commitment to accelerate concrete policy responses to gender-based violence in the context of COVID-19, as well as to promote zero tolerance of gender-based violence in all spheres of society and everywhere.

“Information systems: transforming data into information, information into knowledge and knowledge into political decisions”
Pillar 9 of the Montevideo Strategy for Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the Sustainable Development Framework by 2030

The repository of information on time use in Latin America and the Caribbean of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) compiles data provided by the countries of the region and has the necessary metadata to analyse this information. For the purposes of comparability and the analysis and dissemination of information, data are harmonized to two digits on the basis of the Classification of Time-Use Activities for Latin America and the Caribbean (CAUTAL).

The child marriage indicator corresponds to the proportion of women between the ages of 20 and 24 who were married or were in a stable union before turning 15 and before turning 18, measured as a percentage. Given its relevance, this indicator is part of the indicators included in target 5.3. Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation from Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared on 11 March 2020, in Latin America and the Caribbean, as in other world regions, it has been necessary to address a rise in gender-based violence against women and girls, which has been aggravated by the lockdown measures, physical distancing and mobility restrictions that have left women more isolated from their support networks and created additional barriers in access to essential services. Faced with this global emergency, 146 Member States and observer States have expressed their support for the United Nations Secretary-General’s call in April 2020 to ensure that preventing and redressing violence against women and girls are a core component of national COVID-19 response plans.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and the effects of the measures taken by governments to control its rapid spread have affected most of the world’s population. The United Nations, governments and different civil society organizations, the academic and scientific world and other development actors have warned of the differentiated consequences of the pandemic, which has widened existing gaps between men and women in a number of dimensions. They have accordingly advocated the incorporation of a gender equality perspective into policies, measures and programmes aimed at mitigating and recovering from the crisis. The effects on the sexual and reproductive health of women and girls, which is a key factor in their empowerment, may be particularly severe.

Gender equality is one of the cross-cutting principles of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It is present in the Declaration, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets and in the means of implementation, as well as in the proposed indicators for their follow-up. Along with SDG 5, specifically aimed at achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, 13 other Goals (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16 and 17) establish clear commitments towards equality between men and women.
The 2030 Agenda provides a great opportunity for producing gender-sensitive information; however, it also poses challenges in terms of the quality and coverage of statistical production at the national level. Ensuring that no one is left behind requires indicators for monitoring the SDGs that are suited to the region and that are able to identify the main gender gaps in all dimensions of sustainable development

Understanding femicide or “gender-based killing of women” 1 depends,
to a large extent, on the existence of data deriving from detailed and reliable
records that identify characteristics of the victim, the perpetrator, the relationship
between the two, their environment, motivations and patterns of behaviour,
among other factors.
The Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean has
made progress in measuring femicide in the region and has gathered reliable,
verifiable and comparable information from the countries, with a view to using
it to design, implement and evaluate public policies on protection for victims
of violence, prevention of femicide, reparation for dependent collateral victims,
and punishment of perpetrators.

Time-use surveys are methodological tools for data collection that allow the activities carried out by people in a given period and the amount of time they spend on each of them to be measured quantitatively. Over the last 40 years, the Regional Gender Agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean has driven a gradual development of time-use measurements. Time-use surveys are extremely important because they provide input for the design, formulation, monitoring and evaluation of economic and social equality policies and because of their broad analytical capacity for different areas of research.