UN Women : National Business Statistics Analyst, Home-Based, National Consultant

Background:

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women's rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It provides strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States' priorities and efforts, building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors. UN Women is mandated to lead, coordinate, and promote accountability for the implementation of gender equality commitments across the UN System.

One of the key areas of concern is the economic empowerment of women. It is expressed in targets and indicators of SDG 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls) and SDG 8 (Promote inclusive and sustainable development, decent work and employment for all). Progress toward it depends not only on the adoption of a set of public policies by governments, but also on the existence of an enabling environment and active engagement of the corporate sector. This is also relevant to the achievement of SDG 1 (Poverty Reduction), SDG 10 (Reduced inequalities) and SDG 17 (Revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development).

The economic empowerment of women (WEE) – to succeed and advance economically and to make and act on economic decisions – is a prerequisite for realizing gender equality and empowering women in all areas of life. It is also a cornerstone for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda. UN Women’s global Economic Empowerment Strategy focuses on the key strategic priorities, namely:

• Advancing Gender-Responsive Business Conduct and Creating More Decent Work Opportunities (WEPs)
• Accelerating Gender-Responsive Entrepreneurship for (M)SMEs (i.e. Gender-Responsive Procurement & strengthening women’s entrepreneurship)
• Progressing Safe Migration to Decent Employment
• Transforming Care Systems

WE RISE Together (WRT) – Advancing gender-responsive procurement in the Mekong sub-region is a four-year Mekong-Australia Partnership (MAP) project developed by UN Women. It sits under MAP’s Economic Resilience Fund (MAP-ERF) and addresses its four drivers of resilience (including macroeconomic, household, business, and government resilience). The project responds to the prioritisation of women’s economic empowerment by expanding market access for Women-owned Businesses1 (WOBs) and Gender Responsive Enterprises1 (GREs) through procurement opportunities. WRT tackles the structural gender inequities that exist within the global procurement market in which WOBs secure only one per cent of spending worldwide.2 By introducing and advancing increased market access through gender-responsive procurement1 (GRP), WRT operates with the overall objective to empower more women to equally access, lead, and benefit from expanded market opportunities in the Mekong subregion.

The project works across the Mekong subregion, namely in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam, leveraging the capacity, network and insights build during its phase 1 implementation. The project will work towards three interlinked outcomes:

• Outcome 1: Increased awareness and commitment towards GRP at the ecosystem level & and more gender-responsive institutions through the collection of sex-disaggregated data & improved national data infrastructure
• Outcome 2: Strengthened national policies and public procurement systems that are aligned with Mekong and ASEAN frameworks
• Outcome 3: Increased market connections and opportunities for WOBs and GREs

A core objective of WE RISE Together (WRT), and UN Women’s broader Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) portfolio, is to strengthen enabling environments that expand women’s economic participation, including women with disabilities and other marginalized or underrepresented groups. Across the Mekong subregion, business registration/licensing systems are often a key administrative source for identifying formal enterprises and linking them to markets, government services, and procurement systems. However, these administrative registers typically do not collect sex-, disability-, or other intersectionally disaggregated characteristics at the enterprise or owner level, and data are frequently fragmented across multiple administrative agencies. As a result, statistical systems face limitations in reliably identifying women-owned and other inclusive enterprises, producing supplier-diversity indicators, and supporting the monitoring and evaluation of gender-responsive procurement (GRP) policies. The National Business Statistics Analyst will be reporting to the Thailand Programme Coordinator, with a matrix coordination line to Gender Statistics Specialist in the Women’s Economic Empowerment Section at the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. In close coordination with UN Women and national stakeholders, the National Business Statistics Analyst will assist with conducting a diagnostic assessment of data ecosystems, including data governance, for the production of business statistics in official statistics in Thailand. The diagnostic assessment will also include the identification of challenges and opportunities for integrating gender, disability and intersectionality in business statistics and gender-mainstreaming in the production of business statistics in contexts at different level of statistical maturity.

The work will support the development of an evidence-informed assessment of: