Regina's journey exemplifies how economic empowerment can serve as a powerful tool in reducing HIV stigma and discrimination within communities.

Amira's coffee cupping initiative in Yemen not only preserves the nation's rich coffee heritage but also empowers women to become integral players in enhancing the industry's quality, economic growth, and global recognition.

Çiğdem Kudret was raised in a household where women were discouraged from working outside the home and had never experienced financial independence. After six months of training, in 2019 she joined the production team of a women's cooperative established in the Hatay province of southern Türkiye. However, after a devastating earthquake in 2023 the cooperative suffered significant losses, leaving only 10 percent of their products salvageable. With the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) support, the founder of the cooperative, Atiye Sönmez Erdoğdu, relaunched the cooperative’s e-commerce efforts and rallied other members to resume production despite the challenges. 

Women are paid less than men, do most of the unpaid household and care work, and often struggle to access finance. To address this situation, governments, institutions, and development actors must commit to transformative change. This includes introducing fairer tax systems, promoting women in leadership, addressing unpaid care work, expanding employment opportunities, and dismantling policies that hold women back. UNDP's Gender Equality Seal for Public Institutions helps institutions create equal opportunities. With the Sustainable Development Goals as our guide, UNDP and partners are working to unleash women's economic power. This International Women's Day, let's invest in women and accelerate progress. 

Urgent action is needed to advance women's economic empowerment, as highlighted by the 2024 International Women's Day theme 'Invest in women: Accelerate progress'. 

Productivity has been the driving force behind the five- sometimes six-day workweek, but there is a growing body of evidence that shows a shorter week is equally, if not more productive in many respects. Juliet Schor is a champion of the four-day week and led the charge in the early 90s with her book The Overworked American, which studies the pitfalls of choosing money over time. Schor is an economist and sociologist at Boston College and heads the research for global trials of companies instituting four-day workweeks. Journalist Rhoda Metcalfe spoke with Juliet Schor about her four-day week mission, as part of the IMF Podcast series about Women in Economics.

Voznesensk, a city in Mykolaiv Oblast with a population of about 40,000, was occupied by Russian invasion forces in March 2022. The town was heavily bombarded because of its strategic location, on the way to Kyiv, Odesa and other major cities. The occupation lasted only three days, but more than 700 buildings were damaged or destroyed. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – together with the EU and the Governments of Sweden and Denmark – opened a Recovery and Development Office in the city in early January 2023 to coordinate international aid and support local authorities, NGOs, and businesses. In June 2023, UNDP helped set up a community security and recovery working group and is building two additional police stations to serve over 5,000 residents.

Thousands of moto-taxi drivers in Togo are adopting electric motorcycles as the country aims to become a regional leader in e-mobility. The African country is among over 40 countries collaborating with UNEP's Global Environment Facility to expedite the transition to low-emission transportation through the Global E-mobility Programme.

Alaa Abu Mudallah started the "Khotwa" training center in Gaza to address the lack of practical and technical support for students. The center thrived, with 400-500 students each month, until it was hit and demolished during the Gaza escalation of May 2021, forcing Alaa to start over. As the economic situation worsens in the fourth month of the Gaza war, Alaa has lost everything and is now relying on her savings to survive, which she finds humiliating. An earlier report estimated that if the war continued for more than three months, poverty would increase by 20-45 percent and the Human Development Index would plummet, setting back progress by 11-16 years.

This episode of The Weekly Tradecast looks at the impact of the Israel-Gaza crisis on the Palestinian economy with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) economist Rami Alazzeh. Since the deadly assault by Hamas militants on October 7, Israel's military response has destroyed more than 37,000 buildings and displaced most of the 2.3 million people in the tiny enclave. With so much destruction, UNCTAD says in a new report that rebuilding Gaza will be all the more difficult given the already dire state of the economy from Israel’s decades-long blockade.

Urbanization has led to around 4.4 billion people living in cities today, accounting for 56% of the global population. This has made cities economic powerhouses but has come at a cost. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme (SGP), implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), supports local communities in developing sustainable urban solutions. SGP operates in 127 countries, providing financial and technical support to community-based organizations. Their focus areas include clean energy access and sustainable transport, biodiversity conservation, land use planning, climate action, and more. SGP has supported over 28,000 community-based projects in 136 countries with over $795 million in project funding.

The current Israeli military operation in Gaza will take tens of billions of dollars and many decades to reverse, according to a new report released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). According to the report, the Israeli offensive greatly accelerated the contraction of Gaza's economy, resulting in a 24% contraction of GDP and a 26.1% drop in GDP per capita for the entire year. In addition, has displaced 85% of Gaza's population, halting economic activities and further worsening poverty and unemployment. The recovery of Gaza's economy from the current military operation will demand a financial commitment several times more than the $3.9 billion that resulted from the 2014 military operation in Gaza and will require a concerted international effort to restore pre-conflict socioeconomic conditions.

The World Economic Situation and Prospects 2024, launched in New York, presents a sombre economic outlook for the near term, with global growth in 2024 projected to slow to 2.4 per cent. The world economy in 2023 proved to be resilient, exceeding expectations with an estimated growth rate of 2.7 per cent, higher than the 2.3 per cent forecast last May. Persistently high interest rates, potential escalation of conflicts, sluggish international trade, and increasing climate disasters, pose significant challenges to the world economy.

Equanomics is an initiative led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that aims to make economies work for gender equality. The earnings gap between men and women is only one part of a broader gender imbalance that has many causes and serious consequences for women's well-being and overall development progress. According to the World Bank, if women earned the same as men over their lifetimes, the world could reap a significant 'gender dividend'. This is why lifting women out of poverty is critical to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 on gender equality and has multiplier effects for all 17 Goals. Equanomics envisions a new path by dismantling economic structures that generate and perpetuate gender inequality, and it is helping countries take it by building expertise and supporting partners that want to transform their economies to work better for everyone.

The 2023 Global Investment Trends Monitor by UNCTAD reported a 3% growth in global foreign direct investment (FDI), primarily driven by European "conduit" economies; however, excluding these economies revealed an 18% decline in global FDI flows, indicating mixed results for sustainable development investment.