Literature Review and Expert Consultation Findings

This section provides an overview of the literature review (available in full in Annex A), which analyzed more than 60 documents, and the key takeaways from consultations with key gender, data collection, and early warning experts. IFES found that previous efforts to include gender-sensitive indicators in early warning systems were infrequent and inconsistent, and studies about their effectiveness are not publicly available. These shortcomings persist despite efforts dating back to 2002 to “engender” early warning systems. There is still a widely held, incorrect view among early warning system experts that gender-sensitive indicators do not provide useful or relevant data that can contribute to enhancing the effectiveness and predictive capacity of early warning systems.⁶ This misconception is, in part, due to a lack of reliable, gender-sensitive data and associated datasets – particularly at the subnational level – that can be used to monitor dynamic gender-sensitive indicators.

Within global early warning systems, such as those related to mass atrocities and genocide, gender-sensitive indicators are predominantly absent.⁷ This gap persists despite international legal definitions and/or customary law interpretations for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that include gender-specific human rights abuses and violations such as rape and forced sterilization and abortion.

The literature review found that regional early warning systems are more likely than global systems to integrate gender; however, such efforts are ad hoc. Two notable attempts to integrate gender include: 1) the Economic Community of West African States Early Warning and Response Network; and 2) the Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanism, an initiative of the seven-member Intergovernmental Authority on Development that promotes peace and security in the Horn of Africa. Both of these regional early warning systems have integrated gender-sensitive indicators, but information on the effectiveness of these efforts is not publicly available.

Publicly available information on the integration of gender-sensitive indicators within national and subnational early warning systems is lacking, and there has been little to no published research on the effectiveness of the gender-sensitive indicators within these systems or how these indicators could be modified or applied to other contexts. One noteworthy national initiative frequently cited in other literature is the 2006 United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM, now UN Women) pilot in the Solomon Islands, which developed 46 conflict early warning indicators that were gender-sensitive in consultation with local partners, and tested them in different communities.⁸ While this pilot is frequently referred to in other studies, the extent to which these indicators informed other global or national early warning systems is unknown, and there is no current information on whether these indicators continue to guide preventative action in the Solomon Islands.

The literature review identifies three key challenges relating to integration of gender-sensitive indicators in early warning systems: 1) connecting gender-sensitive indicators to existing public datasets, as there is often no publicly available data that accurately measures the relevant information for the indicator; 2) developing global indicators that also reflect context-specific dynamics and can be adapted to national or subnational early warning systems; and 3) ensuring gender-sensitive data collection approaches, such as women’s participation as monitors and analysts.

Since 2002, gender experts and researchers have been outlining the importance of overcoming these identified challenges and the implications of inconsistent gender integration in early warning systems. The experts consulted in this project echoed the findings from the literature review and further reiterated the need to continue building on efforts to date to integrate gender in early warning systems and more effectively share lessons learned from such projects to inform other initiatives seeking to enhance early warning systems.

During the interviews, experts spoke of the:

• Need for better coordination among gender and early warning communities;
• Importance of having an existing baseline of data to compare new data;
• Lack of commonly accepted gender-sensitive indicators;
• Inconsistencies in the collection of sex-disaggregated data (and associated datasets) even within large institutions and multilateral organizations;
• Importance of data analysts receiving training on gender-sensitive data collection and how to conduct gender analysis at the subnational level; and
• Importance of context specificity, and ongoing consultations with local women and girls, when developing suitable indicators and data collection strategies.

The insights from both the literature review and expert consultations directly shaped the indicators that were adapted and tested during the pilot in Nigeria, as well as the content of this global framework.