UN Women: Consultancy to prepare the ‘’Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals for the Arab States Region: The Gender Snapshot, 2026’’ - International Consultancy - Home Based

Background:

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.

The UN Women Regional Office for the Arab States (ROAS), located in Cairo, Egypt provides support and oversight to country offices in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, the State of Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen. ROAS also provides technical assistance to Kuwait and Bahrain as a non-resident agency and works closely with the UN Women liaison office in the UAE. 

Since 2022, UN Women ROAS has been implementing a regional component of the Flagship Programme Initiative Making Every Woman and Girl Count: Supporting the monitoring and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through better production and use of gender statistics (Women Count), developed by UN Women Headquarters (HQ). The Women Count programme aims to affect a radical shift in the production, availability, accessibility and use of quality data and statistics on key aspects of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

As one of the key activities, UN Women regional office in partnership with UN ESCWA aim to produce ‘’Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals in Arab States: The Gender Snapshot’’. This publication will present the latest evidence on all the 54 SDG specific gender equality indicators across all 17 Goals, calling out the long road ahead to achieve gender equality in the context of the region. It will emphasize the interlinkages among the goals, the pivotal force gender equality plays in driving progress across the SDGs, and women and girls’ central role in leading the way forward in the local context. As gender is one of its focus areas to advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment and providing gender statistics and other disaggregated data by sex towards leaving no one behind, ESCWA will be among the main data source for producing this report. Moreover, the production of this report goes beyond data collection alone. It should be situated as a document to encourage relevant stakeholders in the region such as National Statistical Offices, Women’s Machineries, and policy makers, to utilize gender data for their decision-making to advance their progress to achieve SDGs. 

By the production and dissemination of this report, UN Women regional office and ESCWA aim to foster a culture of data-driven decision-making that empowers policymakers and advocates to design more targeted and impactful interventions, ultimately contributing to the advancement of gender equality and women's empowerment at country and regional levels.

Objective of the Assignment:

Under the direct supervision of the Regional Gender Statistics Specialist at UN Women ROAS and guidance of Head of the Statistical Policies and Coordination Unit at ESCWA, the consultant will lead the production of the “Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals for the Arab States: The Gender Snapshot, 2026.” The report will assess progress and remaining gaps in achieving the SDGs from a gender perspective across the Arab States region.

Description of Responsibilities/ Scope of Work:

The Consultant will be responsible for the implementation of the following tasks:

Assess the progress made to achieve SDGs in the region so far and identify the remaining gaps from the gender perspective by:

• Conduct desktop research on the achievement status for gender-related SDGs indicators in the Arab states;
• Collect the national available data on the gender-related SDGs indicators using the most recent country data;
• Consult with relevant national stakeholders such as National Statistics Office and women’s machineries in the region to learn about their focus and current status of SDGs progress;
• Assess the availability of data on gender related SDG indicators.

Develop the  “Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals in the Arab States: The Gender Snapshot” by 

• Compiling the research results made through desktop research, data analysis, data aggregation in a report format;
• Produce a regional aggregate for each gender related SDG indicators in an Excel file;
• Consider ROAS and ESCWA guidance for producing the report;
• Make the required changes and amendments based on ROAS and ESCWA review of the draft report;
• Providing support for visualization of data, final edit, and lay-out of the printable version of the report in collaboration with the Communications Team of ROAS and ESCWA.

Consultant’s Workplace and Official Travel:

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