1 more than 40%
2 20% to 39%
3 10% to 19%
4 1% to 9%
5 None
6 No Data
1 0 to 5
2 5 to 10
3 10 to 20
4 20 to 30
5 30 to 40
6 40+
7 No Data

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=

Newborn Mortality Rate

What does it mean ?

Newborn (or neonatal) mortality rate refers to the number of deaths of newborn babies(neonates) that occur between birth and the first completed 28 days of life. It is measured as the number of deaths in the first 28 days per every 1000 live births in a given year or period. A live birth refers to any baby that is born that shows signs of life outside of the womb.

Why does it matter ?

The majority of child deaths occur in the first month of life. The newborn mortality rate provides us with a general measure of the health environment during the earliest stages of life. It is a useful indicator of the quality of care at birth in a country. Reducing newborn mortality globally forms part of Sustainable Development Goal 3.2, to end preventable deaths of newborns and children under 5 years of age.

How is it collected ?

If a country has a full birth and death registration system, then calculating Newborn (or Neonatal) Mortality Rates (NMR) is simple as all births and deaths are recorded. Where registration systems are incomplete, information on the births and deaths of babies are obtained from household surveys where women are asked about every baby they have given birth to and how long the child survived or population censuses. To calculate the mortality estimate, the data from these sources are analysed statistically using a particular model designed by the UN Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.

NMR 2018 - World Bank. 2020. Mortality rate, neonatal (per 1,000 live births). https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.NMRT [Accessed 9 March 2020]