Remember: Care for our girls
TODAY,October 11, is the International Day of the Girl Child, which is being celebrated under the theme Girls’ Progress = Goals’ Progress: A Global Girl Data Movement.
According to the United Nations, girls are our future, and this year, for the fifth annual International Day of the Girl Child, we must join global efforts to ensure a world free of discrimination for young women and girls.
This year’s theme focuses on adolescent girls and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set a range of international targets, including on gender equality, to be achieved by 2030.
The world’s 1.1 billion girls are part of a large and vibrant global generation poised to take on the future, the UN said. And so, the ambition for gender equality in the SDGs highlights the preponderance of disadvantage and discrimination borne by girls everywhere on a daily basis.
The UN suggests that only through explicit focus on collecting and analysing girl-focused, girl-relevant and sex-disaggregated data, and using these data to inform key policy and programme decisions, can we adequately measure and understand the opportunities and challenges girls face, and identify and track progress towards solutions to their most pressing problems.
