Rabat – Morocco ranked 88 out of 129 countries in the 2019 SDG Gender Index, a new report on the global progress of gender equality.
Carried out by the Equal Measures 2030, a partnership led by global civil society and the private sector, the report paints a dismal picture of how world governments are addressing the future of gender equality as agreed upon by UN member states in 2015.
With the average score being 65 percent, Morocco received a score of 59.3, which is defined as a “very poor” score.
Morocco came behind Egypt (87th), Lebanon (86th), and Jordan (85th).
According to the report, Israel topped the list of Middle Eastern countries (31st worldwide) with a score of 76.7, followed by Algeria in the second place, with a global rank of 65, and then Tunisia (66th), scoring 66.
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The MENA ranked as the second lowest region, falling behind on a wide range of indicators like women’s legal rights, land ownership, workplace equality, and the extent to which there are legal grounds for abortion.
However, the region scored well on measures of access to basic services, energy, infrastructure.
The report shows that not a single country has fully lived up to the promises laid down in the UN’s 2030 Agenda of sustainable development.
“No one country is the world’s best performer – or even among the world’s top ten performers – across all goals or all indicators,” the report shows, but countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands are the highest ranking countries.
Alison Holder, the director of Equal Measures 2030, noted, “With just 11 years to go, our index finds that not a single one of the 129 countries is fully transforming their laws, policies or public budget decisions on the scale needed to reach gender equality by 2030.”
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She added that the countries are “failing to deliver on the promises of gender equality for literally billions of girls and women.”
The global average score on gender equality stands at 65.7 out of 100, signifying a “poor” and “barely passing grade.”
Nearly 40 percent of women and girls around the world, live in countries that fail to meet the average gender equality expectations, accounting for 2.8 billion of the world’s population.
The report takes into account 14 of the 17 UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), such as health, gender-based violence, and climate change.
