As a popular host and reporter at Imedi TV, Tatia Samkharadze thought she had her dream job – until her boss began making sexually inappropriate comments and advances. When the abuse became unbearable, she decided to record their conversations and used them to become the first woman in Georgia to sue her boss for sexual harassment in 2016.

A central promise of the Sustainable Development Goals is to leave no one behind. Going beyond aggregates and averages is the first step to understanding that every human life is worth being counted.

But how can we ensure that everyone, including the poorest, women, children, the elderly, indigenous people, migrants and people with disabilities are included into the big picture? A project in the Philippines tells the story of how more and better subnational gender statistics can help protect vulnerable groups from falling through the cracks.

Between 2010 and 2020, many Pacific Islands and Territories have updated their traditional data collection processes, embracing new technologies. The island nations Kiribati and Vanuatu, among others, successfully switched to computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), a new data management system and a survey monitoring dashboard. The innovations implemented with support from the Pacific Community helped to weather the impact of the pandemic on census activities and to become fit for the purpose of tracking the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In Palestine, women and girls still face entrenched institutional and social discrimination as a result of long-lasting conflict and a lack of gender-sensitive laws. Local representatives from legislative bodies, broadcasting, unions and legal aid organisations catalysed legal change through a ground-breaking report that used national statistics to highlight the issue.

Palestine paves its way towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Smart political choices for transformative action need reliable information to properly evaluate the current state of play and to determine how best to move forward. Reliable data are also essential for monitoring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at national, regional, and global levels. They allow policymakers to understand if they are on the right track and enable people to hold governments accountable to achieving the agreed goals.

After Shadrack Mutuku Musyoka began working as the Deputy Director in charge of culture, gender and social services at the Kitui County Ministry of Tourism, Sports and Culture in 2014, he wanted to see how his county was doing on the enrolment of both boys and girls in the early years of education.

But he was dismayed to find only a single enrolment figure, with no breakdown by sex. He was similarly frustrated to find that hospital attendance data did not distinguish between visits from women and men.

For a few decades now, gender-based violence (GBV) has been at the front of the feminist agenda. In fact, the Sustainable Development Goals identify “gender equality” as one of the 17 goals to be reached by 2030, with a key target being the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls in the public and private spheres.