Last week, we were watching avidly as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, and Gallup Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton discussed using data to improve the lives of women worldwide at ‘Evidence and Impact: Closing the Gender Data Gap,’ an event hosted by Gallup and the U.S. Department of State at The Gallup Building in Washington, D.C.

“Data already provides strong evidence that demonstrates the links between gender equality and increased prosperity and security,” said Secretary Clinton. “This has been a real focus for us at the State Department. We have been clear from day one that when we’re making the case for elevating the roles of women, we can’t just rely on moral arguments as important and compelling as they might be. We have to make a rigorous case, backed up with solid evidence and data.”

Here at the GSMA mWomen Programme, which was launched with Secretary Clinton in 2010, we are aiming to reduce the mobile phone gender gap by 50% by 2014 and provide life enhancing information services to underserved women in emerging markets. In order for us to do so, we also recognise the importance of solid evidence and data. We identified that there was a lack of consumer insights about the base of the pyramid (BoP) women we aim to serve. For this reason, with partners AusAID and USAID and with primary fieldwork by TNS, we conducted the first-of-its-kind research Striving and Surviving: Exploring the Lives of Base of the Pyramid Women. This surveyed 2500 women from across Egypt, India, Papua New Guinea and Uganda to learn about their life challenges, aspirations and pain points as well as their mobile usage. Per Helmersen, the outgoing GSMA mWomen Research Manager discusses the importance of consumer insight research and data collection here. To encourage organisations from both the mobile industry and the development community to collect their own data to understand the BoP women in their markets, we’ve made freely available all the tools used during this research here.

The full text and a video of Secretary Clinton’s remarks at the ‘Evidence and Impact: Closing the Gender Data Gap’ event can be found here