International Women’s Day is a time to reflect on progress made by Latin American and Caribbean governments to advance towards gender equality and to call for greater efforts to improve women’s and girls’ lives in the region. On this special occasion, the OECD Development Centre is launching the fourth edition of the Social Institutions and Gender Index 2019 Global Report: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities. The SIGI is an innovative tool for development practitioners to understand better the barriers to women’s empowerment and gender equality. The SIGI looks at social institutions holistically by looking at the de jure and the de facto situations across 180 countries. It has also been officially recognised as an official data source to monitor progress on SDG 5.1.1. Evidence based on the newly released SIGI 2019 shows that current level of discrimination in laws and social norms induces an income loss of USD 401 billion in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Learn more about the progress made so far and the key challenges that lie ahead of Latin American and Caribbean countries in achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls in this video:

Alejandra Meneses, policy analyst for the gender team at the OECD Development Centre