in addition central gender institutions may play a stronger role in working with ministries to define and coordinate their needs for genderdisaggregated data even when such data exist some governments still need encouragement to employ gender statistics in their planning and budgetary processes consequently national gender institutions must often engage in developing guidelines manuals and training materials to promote the development and collection of genderdisaggregated statistics as well as designing methodologies to encourage their application gendersensitive indicators provide a useful tool to communicate goals and objectives within an overall vision and strategy for gender equality they are used to assess progress in achieving gender equality by measuring changes in the status of women and men and may be used to measure a particular intervention towards achieving greater gender equality focusing on measuring what matters can help drive the achievement of results and monitor performance against the desired goals for gender equality