From data to transformation

UNDP uses evidence to drive change. In crisis settings, we generate and apply gender-responsive data to strengthen women’s leadership, resilience, and economic power.

Our analyses turn insight into action—ensuring that crisis prevention, response, and recovery efforts are inclusive, equitable, and transformative.

Gender data for policy and programmes

UNDP supports data systems that put gender equality at the center of policy decisions.

In recent years, 68 countries have enhanced their gender data capacities with UNDP’s support through instruments like care georeferencing tools, AI for social data analysis, and gender observatories that guide real-time recovery planning.

This resulted in better-informed budgets, services, and recovery strategies that expand women’s choices and opportunities.

Gender-responsive crisis and conflict analyses

Accurate data saves lives. UNDP conducts gender-responsive analyses that reveal how power relations, access, and decision-making shape people’s experience of conflict and recovery. These analyses form the evidence base for UNDP’s country programmes, linking data with early warning, economic recovery, peacebuilding, and inclusive governance.

Partnerships with local actors

Data is strongest when grounded in lived experience. UNDP collaborates with governments, women’s organizations, human rights defenders, activists, and academics to generate context-specific evidence and policy insights. Together, we measure progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment goals.

Embedding Gender in recovery planning

UNDP ensures that post-disaster needs assessments (PDNAs), socioeconomic impact assessments (SEIAs), and rapid assessments (RAPIDAs) include robust gender analyses, helping shape inclusive recovery strategies that support communities in building back better.

Strengthening national data systems

UNDP supports national partners in establishing or enhancing systems that integrate sex- and age-disaggregated data within national statistics frameworks, ensuring that official data captures the realities of all people.

Building institutional capacity

By engaging with ministries and public institutions working on gender equality and women’s empowerment, UNDP strengthens their capacity to support and monitor sex and age-disaggregated data collection and analysis.

Innovation in data collection 

When traditional data systems are disrupted, UNDP turns to digital and community-driven approaches—mobile data, satellite mapping, and rapid social listening—to ensure that the realities of women and their communities inform every decision.

Gender-Responsive Conflict Analysis (GRCA) 

In complex and fragile contexts, traditional conflict analysis often overlooks gendered power relations and intersectional inequalities. The Gender-Responsive Conflict Analysis (GRCA) provides a structured methodology to integrate gender perspectives throughout conflict analysis—identifying how power, access, and participation shape the experiences of women, men, girls, and boys in crises, and how these dynamics can drive or resolve conflict. The GRCA helps practitioners: 

• Identify gender-specific drivers, impacts, and opportunities for peace;
• Shape recovery and stabilization programmes that address underlying inequalities;
• Inform policy and coordination with evidence-based, locally grounded insights;
• Strengthen linkages between the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and broader crisis prevention and recovery efforts. 

GRCA for development programming: A UNDP guidance note

The GRCA Guidance Note equips UNDP staff and partners with a comprehensive and practical framework to integrate gender perspectives into conflict analysis and across crisis prevention, response, and recovery programming. It ensures that UNDP interventions are gender-transformative—addressing not only the symptoms of crises but also the structural inequalities that drive them.

Grounded in principles of participation, conflict sensitivity, intersectionality, and the “do no harm” approach, the Gender-Responsive Conflict Analysis (GRCA) framework offers a step-by-step methodology adaptable to diverse contexts, from rapid-onset emergencies to protracted crises.

• Module 1 – Why GRCA matters: Links gender-responsive analysis to the WPS agenda, SDGs, and the UNDP Strategic Plan, showing how women’s participation strengthens peacebuilding.
• Module 2 – What GRCA is: Defines core principles and clarifies what GRCA is – and is not – providing a structured process for transformative analysis.
• Module 3 – Planning and preparation: Offers tools for scoping, team assembly, and partnerships with governments, civil society, and UN agencies.
• Module 4 – Conducting a GRCA: Details participatory methods, ethical safeguards, digital tools, and analysis techniques.
• Module 5 – Translating analysis into action: Guides practitioners in validating findings, developing recommendations, and integrating gender indicators into planning, budgeting, monitoring, and evaluation frameworks.