To End Poverty, We Need to Know What We Don’t Know About Women and Girls | Sri Mulyani Indrawati
And until we have accurate data about women’s health too, we may design programs that are destined to fail or simply fail to deliver what might have been a transformational impact.
The World Bank Group, along with many of our partners, is focused more intently now on finding and filling these data gaps. We are working with Data2X, UN agencies, and others to address some of these knowledge black holes.
But it is not just data. Sometimes our definitions fall short. Take, for example, the way we view income and labor. It simply doesn’t cover enough of the work that women, and in particular poor women, are doing—especially in their own households and the vast “informal” economy in which most of the world’s poorest people work.
We are working to implement new international definitions of work and employment that recognize all productive activities, paid and unpaid, as work. They also introduce the concept of “own-use production work,” which includes goods and services women provide for a household, such as a meal.
More: To End Poverty, We Need to Know What We Don’t Know About Women and Girls | Sri Mulyani Indrawati
The PDF linked in the article is for a Power Point that shows that only part of what we we consider “work” is actual paid work. The myth of the lazy unemployed is too simple. The economic value of individual work is far more complex.