Empowering Women: The Key to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals

IGHT broad objectives are targeted in the Millennium Development Goals. One goal specifically aims to promote gender equality, but it is clear that empowering women is absolutely crucial in order to meet the entire range of targets.

In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, the largest-ever gathering of world leaders -- 147 heads of State and Government and representatives from 189 nations in total -- agreed to a groundbreaking set of time-bound and measurable goals and targets. These Millennium Development Goals, as they came to be known, aim to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women. The Summit's Millennium Declaration also outlined a wide range of commitments in human rights, good governance and democracy.

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals, Goal 3 calls for empowering women and promoting gender equality, specifically setting targets to eliminate gender disparity in all levels of education by 2015, with additional indicators on employment of women and the proportion of women in parliaments. However, it is widely felt that gender equality is an essential cross-cutting component for meeting all the targets.

"In our work to reach those objectives, as the Millennium Declaration made clear, gender equality is not only a goal in its own right; it is critical to our ability to reach all the others", said Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Study after study has shown that there is no effective development strategy in which women do not play a central role", he added.

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Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015:
Goal 1 -- Halve extreme poverty and hunger
Goal 2 -- Achieve universal primary education
Goal 3 -- Empower women and promote equality between women and men
Goal 4 -- Reduce under-five mortality by two thirds
Goal 5 -- Reduce maternal mortality by three quarters
Goal 6 -- Reverse the spread of diseases, especially HIV/AIDS and malaria
Goal 7 -- Ensure environmental sustainability
Goal 8 -- Create a global partnership for development, with targets for aid, trade and debt relief

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According to the World Bank, a growing body of evidence confirms that when greater equality exists between men and women, "economies tend to grow faster, the poor move more quickly out of poverty, and the well being of men, women and children is enhanced". Many studies also show that investing in women has clear policy payoffs, and repeatedly recognize gender awareness and gender equality as both essential means and an end of development. So far, the tendency in the development debate has been to focus on women mainly as mothers, especially in areas linked to reproduction, such as population services, nutrition, education and child-related services, whereas women have been absent figures in other areas such as mainstream employment schemes and land reform programmes. Development strategies, it is argued, need to put greater emphasis on gender equality in the distribution of benefits and outcomes across the range of development goals.

Eveline Herfkens, Executive Coordinator for the Millennium Development Goals Campaign, stressed that with women representing the majority of those living on less than a dollar a day -- the measure of extreme poverty -- none of the goals would be achieved unless Goal 3 is achieved. Calling the strategy a win/win situation she said, "the Millennium Development Goals were endorsed by everybody as a package to stop wasting time and bring the human back at the centre of the agenda. We will not achieve those goals unless we start seeing women as actors, not just victims and recipients."


Although the Millennium Declaration recognizes that equal rights and opportunities of women and men must be assured, according to the World Bank, in no region of the developing world are women equal to men in legal, social, and economic rights. And while the last two decades have seen some progress in many parts of the world in gender inequalities in schooling and health, significant gaps persist in some countries. Girls are lagging behind in access to education. To achieve universal primary education, additional efforts must be taken to promote girls' enrolment and to change cultural stereotypes and beliefs, which, coupled with extreme poverty, often result in high dropout rates for girls.

Gender gaps in access to and control of resources, in economic opportunities and in power and political voices are widespread. To date, only four countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway) have achieved a combination of approximate gender equality in secondary school enrolment, at least a 30 per cent share for women of seats in parliaments or legislatures, and an approximate 50 per cent share of paid employment in non-agricultural activities for women.
In most countries, women continue to have less access to social services and productive resources than men.

Women remain vastly under-represented in national and local assemblies, on average accounting for only 14 per cent of the seats in national parliaments. In most low-income countries, girls are less likely to attend school than boys. Even when girls start school at the same rate as boys, they are more likely to drop out. In industrial countries, women in the wage sector earn an average of 77 per cent of what men earn; in developing countries, they earn 73 per cent.


Women and Poverty

The number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide, on less than one dollar a day, exceeds 1.3 billion. Women, especially in developing countries, bear an unequal share of the burden of poverty. Although it is difficult to document the exact percentage because of a lack of statistical data, it is generally thought that the majority of the world's poor are women .

In addition, the gap between women and men caught in the cycle of poverty has continued to widen in the past decade.

Women living in poverty are often denied access to critical resources such as credit, land and inheritance. Their labour often goes unrewarded and unrecognized. Their health care and nutritional needs are not given priority, they lack sufficient access to education and support services, and their participation in decision-making at home and in the community are minimal. Bias against women increases even further with the degree of poverty. Caught in the cycle of poverty, women are more vulnerable because of inequalities in access to productive resources and in control over their own labour and earned income.

Not only does gender inequality exacerbate poverty; poverty also exacerbates inequality between men and women. Inequalities between girls and boys in access to schooling or health care are more acute among the poor than among those living with higher incomes. Poor men tend to have less influence in the community than other men and poor women generally have the least influence. These disparities place women and girls at a disadvantage and limit their capacity to participate in and benefit from development.

One issue that clearly demonstrates how gender disparities exacerbate poverty for women is access to safe drinking water. Over one billion people lack access to safe drinking water, roughly one-sixth of the world's population, and 2.4 billion or 40 per cent of the world's people lack access to adequate sanitation services. Without ready access to safe water, the poor -- especially women and girls -- spend much of their time scavenging for it. Some 6,000 children die every day from diseases associated with unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene. Unsafe water and sanitation cause an estimated 80 per cent of all diseases in the developing world. Women and girls tend to suffer the most as a result of the lack of sanitation facilities.

Rainwater Harvesting: Empowering Women in Kenya Masai women have joined a pioneering new anti-drought initiative that promises to dramatically reduce the time spent finding and collecting sufficient clean and healthy water supplies. The project involves harvesting rainwater using special low-cost containers and digging mini-reservoirs or "earth pans". It allows women to collect fresh and unpolluted water on their doorsteps rather than being forced to trek many frustrating miles. The project is part of a wider international initiative funded by the Government of Sweden and is carried out by EarthCare Africa, which has developed the project on behalf of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Similar projects are underway in Nepal, India, Bhutan and Tonga. So far, facilities capable of holding over 520,000 litres of harvested rainwater have been installed at three locations in Kenya. Future spin-offs from the project include kitchen gardens, as the availability of moist soil around the mini-reservoirs makes ideal conditions for growing small plots of crops.

Illiteracy -- A Woman's Face

Two thirds of the world's 876 million illiterates are women. Of the 113 million children of primary school age who are not attending school, almost two thirds are female. While these statistics tell a stark story, there has been some progress. During the second half of the 20th century, the primary enrolment rates of girls approximately doubled in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, rising faster than boys' enrolment rates. However, there are still fewer girls than boys who finish primary school. By the time they reach 18, girls have an average of 4.4 years less education than boys.

Women's illiteracy is caused by many related factors. Girls in many countries are expected to begin helping out at an early age with household responsibilities, which prevents them from attending formal schooling. In some countries, educating women is not considered essential and is sometimes contrary to the traditional role women are expected to perform. While cultural and social factors have a major impact on female access to schooling, poverty is the most critical barrier to education, in particular for girls.

Kochiro Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General, highlights the link between education and poverty when he asks: "How can poverty be eradicated when the roots of ignorance are left undisturbed?"
Literacy, particularly the literacy of women, is one of the most important factors for sustainable and equitable development. Educated women generally have a higher income and a better capacity to care for and support their families. United Nations data show that educated women have smaller families and better space their children. Literate mothers are more likely to send their children, including girls, to school, than illiterate ones.

Studies show that one of the main determinants of under-five mortality rates is the mother's education level. Thus, educating women is a crucial factor in achieving Goal 4 of the Millennium targets, which calls for a reduction by two thirds of the mortality rate among children under five. Educated mothers make better choices regarding nutrition and health care for themselves and their children, and overall their children tend to be healthier than those of uneducated women.

Bangladesh: Educating Girls As recently as 1991, the educational attainment of Bangladeshi women was among the lowest in the world. Eighty per cent were illiterate. Equipped with few skills and uninformed about health care, family planning, and nutrition, they were trapped in a cycle of dependency. To ensure that school-age girls, especially those in rural areas, receive an education, the Female Secondary School Assistance Project was set up in the early 1990s by the World Bank and the government of Bangladesh. The project provided incentives to keep girls in schools and resulted in a sharp rise in the number of girls enrolled in grades six through ten. The girls brought into the programme, mainly from poor rural families, receive a small cash stipend to ease the financial burden of their education. To further encourage schools to enrol girls, a tuition assistance payment has also been provided to schools that choose to participate in the programme. In the areas targeted by the project, female enrolment more than doubled to more than 1 million in 2001 from 462,000 in 1994. The overall proportion of females who married at an early age in areas served by the project declined between 1992 and 1995, to 14 per cent from 19 per cent for 13 to 15-year-olds, and to 64 per cent from 72 per cent for 16 to 19-year-olds. The benefits of educating girls have reached far beyond increasing individual opportunity. Higher education levels for girls have been shown to alleviate problems such as high birth rates, poor health practices, and high infant mortality. This project is providing continued support to a very effective effort on the part of the Bangladeshi government to enable poor rural girls to improve not only their own lives, but the well-being of the country. The Millennium Development Goals call for equal enrolments of girls and boys in primary and secondary school by the year 2005. In 1995, girls made up only 43 per cent of gross primary school enrolment in low-income countries. Although girls' secondary enrolment has been rising at a faster rate than boys, by 2005 they will still make up only 47 per cent of all primary enrolment. The extent of female disadvantage in education varies enormously across countries. Gender gaps in education are large in Western and Central Africa, North Africa and South Asia. In India, for example, there is a 16.6 percentage point difference between the school enrolment of girls and boys aged 6 to 14. In Niger, the enrolment rate of boys aged 6 to 14 is 41 percent higher than the enrolment rate of girls. © 2002 The World Bank Group

HIV/AIDS - Haunting with a Vengeance

Women comprise about half of the 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, of which 95 per cent live in developing countries and 70 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa. No example could better illustrate how crucial empowering women is for reaching the Millennium Development Goals than the findings of a recent interagency United Nations mission on HIV/AIDS in southern Africa, led by Stephen Lewis, the United Nations Secretary-General's Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa.