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The purpose of this indicator is to measure the extent to which countries have national laws and regulations that guarantee full and equal access to women and men aged 15 years and older to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education.

The indicator is a percentage (%) score from 0 to indicating a country’s status and progress in the existence of national laws and regulations. Indicator 5.6.2 seeks to measure the extent to which countries have national laws and regulations that guarantee full and equal access to women and men aged 15 years and older to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education.

Women's Department

Women's Department

Annual

Percentage (%)

Indicator 5.6.2 seeks to provide the first comprehensive global assessment of legal and regulatory frameworks in line with the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Program of Action, the Beijing Platform for Action, and international human rights standards.

Laws: laws and statutes are official rules of conduct or action prescribed, or formally recognized as binding, or enforced by a controlling authority that governs the behaviour of actors (including people, corporations, associations, government agencies). 

Regulations: are considered to be executive, ministerial or other administrative orders or decrees.   At the municipal level, regulations are sometimes called ordinances.  Regulations and ordinances issued by governmental entities have the force of law, although circumscribed by the level of the issuing authority.  Under this methodology, only regulations with national-level application are considered. 

Restrictions: many laws and regulations contain restrictions in the scope of their applicability.  Such restrictions, which include, though are not limited to, those by age, sex, marital status, and requirement for third party authorization, represent barriers to full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education. 

Plural legal systems: are defined as legal systems in which multiple sources of law co-exist.  Such legal systems have typically developed over a period of time as a consequence of colonial inheritance, religion and other socio-cultural factors.  The co-existence of multiple sources of law can create fundamental contradictions in the legal system, which result in barriers to full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education. 

“Guarantee” (access): for the purpose of this methodology, “guarantee” is understood in relation to a law or regulation that assures a particular outcome or condition.  The methodology recognizes that laws can only guarantee “in principle”; for the outcomes to be fully realized in practice, additional steps, including policy and budgetary measures will need to be in place.

This indicator is disaggregated by thematic section.

The indicator measures specific legal enablers and barriers for 13 components across four thematic areas. The calculation of the indicator requires data for all 13 components, then computation of the total score from those values. 

The 13 components are placed on the same scale, with 0% being the lowest value and 100% being the most optimal value. Each component is scored independently and weighted equally.  The score for a given component is calculated as:

((Number of enablers that exist / Total number of enablers) – (Number of barriers that exist / Total number of barriers)) *100

The total score for Indicator 5.6.2 is calculated as the arithmetic mean of the 13 component scores. Similarly, the score for each thematic section is calculated as the arithmetic mean of its constituent component scores. 

Ministry Responsible for Gender Relations and Ministry of Health revise policies that relate to access to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education and conduct strategies and actions that seek to garner access to access to sexual and reproductive health care, information and education to women aged 15-49 years.

Indicator 5.6.2 measures exclusively the existence of laws and regulations and their barriers. It does not measure the implementation of such laws/regulations.

The 13 components are intended to be indicative of sexual and reproductive health care, information and education, instead of a complete or exhaustive list of the care, information and education. These components were selected because they were identified as key parameters according to international consensus documents and human rights standards.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/. /.