Today, the National Women's launched the Belize Gender Info database.
It is a means of using data to track the progress of a certain gender group over time. Anne Marie Williams explained the use and importance of the information:..
Anne - Marie Williams
"The gender info is more than just a sex-disaggregated database; it's a database that takes into consideration the disparities and the disadvantages particularly faced by women and account for them. The gender info is something that the commission wanted to do for a long time as a result of the recommendations coming from the CIDA committee that Belize has to setup database in order to do evidence-base planning and reporting because we report to the CIDA committee every 4 years. It is important to not only have the data but have the data in a form that shows women's' contribution. We decide to do a gender info which will adequately show the contributions of boys and girls, men and women in Belize."
Ashanti Garcia, National Women's Commission
"For example the common person out there might want to know how can this database be important for me and I would like to point out that it's important for all the families in Belize especially those who have children because as I showed before there are certain levels where students tend to drop out and so if you have male and female children you may want to loot at okay, maybe I need to push my child harder to study more because at Standard 3 a lot of them drop out. Then once you know they have graduated from Standard 6, you are happy, but the next biggest challenge is getting them from Standard 6 to First form. These are issue and information that you can get out of the database that serves as a practical way of going about making your own decisions and advising your family members of how to go about in their lives because it tells you what is the story and how you can go about to change it."
The gender info will be made available on the NWC's website.
