The Gender Justice Initiative (GJI) is an effort to promote gender equality in the Arab States region where multiple sources of law, the persistence of customary practices, socio-economic, cultural, and political factors, and lack of coordination between the judicial and security sectors act as serious impediments for women to have the same rights and obligations as men before the law. This disparity hinders the achievement of gender equality and therefore the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, especially goals 5, 10 and 16.

Over the course of three years, GJI collected and produced verified country reports on the state of gender-based laws for each country in the Arab States region. The 18 country reports of the initiative, “Gender Justice & the Law” were launched in December 2018 by UNDP’s Amman Regional Hub, in collaboration with its sister agencies UNFPA, UN Women and ESCWA.  GJI recognizes that the information provided in the final report represents a “snapshot” or the situation at a specific period in time. GJI also recognizes that mindsets, behavior and laws do not necessarily change just because information has become available. 

GJI now faces two overriding challenges:

1. How do we keep the national information, including the analysis and score sheets, up to date?

2. How can the data and its analysis be used to change mindsets, behavior and laws?

To address these issues, the GJI team will host an “Open Innovation Challenge”. The specific objectives of the Open Innovation Challenge are to develop an innovative mechanism that will: 1. keep the GJI’s analysis up to date, accessible and useful for governments, policy makers and activists while ensuring the way it is presented promotes action by users; 2. Make the data and material easily accessible for reporting against the SDGs targets as well as for analysis and advocacy purposes; 3. Facilitate the ownership by national stakeholders and encourage their commitments to advocate for reforms in the penal codes, family law, nationality law and labor laws; 4. Create a network of stakeholders, experts and donors with substantial knowledge and experience in gender inequalities and the law in the Arab states region.

In addition to the above objectives, the initiative should be designed to highlight the status of gender justice and the law in the Arab states region, and to stress that law reform will constitute a key driver for achieving the SDGs across the region.