The current project aims to improve the capacity of relevant national institutions in selected countries, focusing on national statistical offices and entities responsible for mainstreaming gender in development policies and programmes to use data and statistics to monitor, measure, and analyse progress in achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. It is being proposed in response to clear and repeatedly stated demands for more and better data and statistics on women and men, and gender-based indicators. The project is designed to build on and provide specific support to ongoing capacity building initiatives of the main implementing partners of the projects. Project activities will increase capacity of institutions and their staff to address the current gaps and weaknesses in data systems and to utilize, analyse, disseminate and communicate existing data and statistics, guided by a coherent framework of gender statistics and indicators relevant to their specific contexts.