Press Center

By Dorothy Otieno From the article: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will not be achieved without closing the gender data gap, said experts at the second UN World Data Forum. When businesses, governments and other players are armed with data, they are able to improve the everyday decisions they make, yet for women and girls, basic information about their lives is lacking. As a result, their needs are not being prioritised and their contributions are undervalued, according to gender and data experts at the forum held in Dubai. “There is no equality of information on women and girls that is governing policy. Data in all aspects of girls’ and women’s lives is missing or is biased,” says Emily Courey Pryor, executive director of Data2X, an alliance dedicated to improving the quality and use of gender data that is housed at the United Nations Foundation. An audit by UN Women shows that about a fifth or 53 out of 241 SDGs indicators explicitly refer to sex, gender, women and girls or are largely targeted at women and girls. A less restrictive criterion, where all indicators that are relevant for women and girls and can be disaggregated by sex are included, would yield a greater number of indicators. But a third of the indicators proposed to track progress on gender issues cannot be generated globally because international standards measuring them do not exist and most countries do not conduct regular surveys on them, says Mayra Buvinic, a senior fellow at Data2X and Centre for Global Development. Read the full article here.   

By Mark Moran From the article: If you set out by dinghy from the northern-most inhabited part of Australia you will make landfall in Papua New Guinea (PNG) fairly soon. Boigu Island, part of Queensland, is the most northerly island in the Torres Strait. With its own Australia Post outlet, it is less than ten kilometres from the PNG coast, an area known as South Fly District, part of Western Province. (Fly refers to Fly River, a major feature of the area.) PNG, a country often overlooked by the Australian public, is enjoying the fierce competition among foreign powers for influence in the country after APEC ended in stalemate and heightened US-China tensions. APEC was held in Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, earlier this week. For PNG, the attention may well translate to development funds. Already, the US has pledged to work with Australia to upgrade Lombrum naval base on Manus Island, in what is widely seen as a counter to rising influence from Beijing in the region. Read the full article here.  

By Ivy Kaplan From the article: Experts believe anti-immigration rhetoric coming from the White House is now negatively impacting the economy as both high-skilled and low-skilled migrants are being discouraged from coming to the US. Since President Donald Trump took office in 2016, political rhetoric coming from the White House has painted migrants as threats to the U.S. economy, claiming that they steal jobs, lower wages and act as an overall economic net drain on domestic resources. While many of these claims remain baseless, experts believe they are now negatively impacting the economy as both high-skilled and low-skilled migrants are being discouraged from coming to the U.S. “[That immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars] is a talking point that is provided to the president by people who don’t have any information on the subject,” Michael Clemens, co-director of migration, displacement, and humanitarian policy at the Center for Global Development said on November 2. “We get nowhere, and we certainly don’t get any useful innovation from starting with talking points based on disinformation.”    Read the full article here