Kampala — Higher institutions of learning should integrate gender into their statistics courses, the Prime Minister, Prof. Apolo Nsibambi, has said.

"There is need to engender statistics across all sectors. This is the only way that gender inequalities can be identified and their elimination expedited," he said, in a speech read by the gender state minister Rukia Nakadama.

This was at the ongoing international meeting on gender statistics at Statistics House in Kampala.

Participants from over 30 African countries are taking part in the conference.

Nsibambi said the growing global struggle for gender equality needed to be strengthened on a scientific basis.

"One of the pre-conditions for a just and sustainable society is the empowerment of women."

The premier noted that the Government had been persistent in resolving inequities between sexes, especially through institutionalising gender in development programmes.

He called on the private sector and the civil society to use data on gender for investment and business planning, decision making, implementation, monitoring, reporting and evaluation of their plans and programmes.

Explaining the purpose of the meet, the president of the Uganda Statistics Society, Abraham Yeyo Owino, said: "It aims at strengthening gender statistics and we hope to come up with mechanisms to measure gender.

"We have been underestimating the contribution of women, so there is need to find tools to measure their contribution, so that they feature in social, economic and political development plans and policies."