The FAO-UN Women partnership to support countries in producing sex-disaggregated data on agricultural landownership: SDG indicator 5.a.1

At the beginning of 2021, the global SDG database contained values of the indicator 5.a.1 for only 10 countries. To address this gap, UN Women and FAO launched a concerted effort to accelerate national reporting on the indicators through a multi-pronged strategy. Starting in mid-2021, the initiative supported 10 pilot countries in Asia, the Pacific and Latin America to assess their data systems and determine the suitability of existing data collection vehicles for gathering the required data. The ultimate objective was to integrate an appropriately designed short module in an ongoing national survey in a large number of countries. In addition, the FAO-UN Women initiative developed methods for generating proxy measures from internationally-supported national surveys that gather information on agricultural land ownership but not sufficient enough to estimate 5.a.1 according to the internationally agreed methodology endorsed by the UN Statistical Commission. This exercise provided new initial estimates for use in global reporting for 23 countries.

This paper published in the Statistical Journal of the IAOS describes the FAO-UN Women efforts, demonstrating how they have increased the capacity of national statistical systems to collect data for estimating 5.a.1. The paper offers recommendations on how existing surveys and agricultural censuses can integrate the necessary data to accurately produce indicator 5.a.1, drawing from the technical results of the work with pilot countries.