Monitoring the New Urban Agenda follow-up for gender equality

After twenty years, in October 2016, delegates from about 170 countries met in Quito, Ecuador, at the Habitat III Conference to discuss about urbanization and plan a new idea about the city of future. At the end of the four days meeting the final text of New Urban Agenda was signed engaging all the countries, on voluntary base, to implement the commitments for a new urban scenario.The resolution stimulates countries to develop the strategy at different levels (global, national, regional and local) recognizing the importance of taking concrete action to achieve the desired results. The final section of the New Urban Agenda prefigures a review process by engaging the Un-Habitat for controlling the implementation of the document. The New Urban Agenda recognizing the importance of the participation of all citizens to a gender vision within the policies, plans and processes that will manage the urbanization in the coming years. It encourages a voluntary, open, inclusive broad participation, guided by the national governments. It acknowledges the importance of local governments in implementing actions in accordance with the regional and national ones, in order to prepare appropriate tools for monitoring. Moreover the monitoring of the New Urban Agenda should be coordinated with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development for guaranteeing reliability, although it is not clear how this can be implemented. If we assume the New Urban Agenda is an implementation agreement strictly linked to 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, then it should mainly contribute to the Goal 11 - Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, and to the urban dimension of the other SDG (fig. 2), particularly Goal 5 - Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls (fig. 3). That means NUA could detail qualitative and quantitative indicators used to evaluate urban advancements in the context of 2030 Agenda. Moreover the monitoring process needs to be localized in the different countries and regions, and New Urban Agenda could support this method involving cities.The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development monitoring process is based on a few selected indicators for each goal, and particularly the Goal n.11 has its specific Guide Lines to assist national and local governments to monitor and report on SDG Goal 11 indicators (SDG-Goal 11 Monitoring Framework). The Monitoring Framework proposes an integrated innovative mechanism to keep away from the risk of an extreme sectorial approach produced by a direct relationship of one specific indicator and its target. The framework adopts a comprehensive approach to the city linking each target to the complexity of the urban features and, furthermore, proposes a platform with better-integrated information contained in each indicator. In such a way it's possible to understand the multiple interactions of all thematic indicators.Moreover, in 2012, UN-Habitat created a new global monitoring tool to measure sustainability at urban level: the City Prosperity Index (fig. 4), based on a holistic, integrated and systemic view of the city. The commitment of the New Urban Agenda aiming at integrating gender perspective in the urban agenda is certainly a success but women in the document have been mentioned mainly as they belong to vulnerable groups and not as agents of change. Moreover many of the experiences implemented in the world today are pilot projects, manuals or toolkits and ultimately rhetorical statements within the Gender Equality Plans but they are not actually implemented in urban development. Commitment to research and the academy could be, first of all, the creation of a database of information with the production of indicators to assess gender mainstreaming.