1 60% or over
2 40% to 59%
3 20% to 39%
4 10% - 19%
5 less than 10%
6 No Data
1 more than 40%
2 20% to 39%
3 10% to 19%
4 1% to 9%
5 None
6 No Data

Married Too Soon

What does it mean ?

Child marriage (also known as early marriage) is defined as a formal marriage or informal union before age 18. It is measured as the percentage of women who are in a marriage / union before the age of 18 years. It is often presented specifically for women currently aged 20-24 years only in order to give an indication of recent prevalence.

Why does it matter ?

As well as being a violation of a girl or young woman's human rights, early or child marriage is associated with curtailment of education, psychosocial disadvantage, poor reproductive health, increased risk of intimate partner violence and poor child health outcomes for the subsequent generation. The elimination of early and child marriage is a target for Sustainable Development Goal 5: toachieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Target 5.3: "by 2030 to eliminate all harmful practices, such as early, forced and child marriage, and female genital mutilation."

How is it collected ?

In high and some middle income countries estimates are based on vital registration data. However, most estimates are based on self-reported, retrospective data from large scale, nationally representative surveys such as Demographic and Health (DHS) or Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). It must be noted that these surveys adopt a broad definition of marriage / union which includes legal and "traditional" marriages, as well as consensual unions with cohabitation.

UNICEF datasets most recent available data http://data.unicef.org/child-protection/child-marriage.html
Accessed 15th August 2016

Making Women's Voices Heard

What does it mean ?

The proportion of parliamentary seats held by women refers to the number of seats held be women members in single or lower chambers of national parliaments, divided by the total number of all occupied seats.

Why does it matter ?

MDG Goal 3 aimed to promote gender equality and empower women. One critical way of achieving this goal is to ensure women’s voices are heard at the national level when making policy decisions that affect them.

This indicator represents the proportion of parliamentary seats held by women for each country. The aim of this indicator is to show that countries which have greater representation of women by women are on the way to achieving gender equality and female empowerment.

How is it collected ?

National parliaments can be bicameral or unicameral. This indicator covers the single chamber in unicameral parliaments and the lower chamber in bicameral parliaments. It does not cover the upper chamber of bicameral parliaments. Seats are usually won by members in general parliamentary elections. Seats may also be filled by nomination, appointment, indirect election, rotation of members and by-election.

Seats refer to the number of parliamentary mandates, or the number of members of parliament.

The proportion of seats held by women in national parliament is derived by dividing the total number of seats occupied by women by the total number of seats in parliament.

There is no weighting or normalising of statistics.

Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) www.ipu.org. Data represent most recently available year, 2012 – 2015. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SG.GEN.PARL.ZS&country=