Thematic Paper on MDG3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

In 2000, the UN system drew up eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to provide a set of benchmarks to measure progress towards the eradication of global poverty. MDG 3, to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, includes a target on education and additional indicators on women’s employment and political representation.

This paper considers some of the key interventions that have been successful, and sets out the progress that has been made toward achieving MDG 3 and the other targets related to women’s sexual and reproductive health. It also highlights the gaps that continue to exist. It makes a series of recommendations for accelerating progress, including:

• Remove the barriers to girls’ education by providing scholarships, cash transfers and eliminating user fees; track completion and attendance rates; improve the quality of education and tackle violence against girls in school; and scale up investments in enrolment.
• Promote equal skills development and employment opportunities; reduce wage gaps between women and men; introduce social protection measures and labour laws that are gender-responsive; and introduce and enforce legal protections for the most vulnerable women workers.
• Introduce positive action to improve the numbers and influence of women in all political decision-making.
• Invest in community health approaches to tackle maternal mortality, meeting unmet need for family planning and addressing high adolescent fertility rates; and take measures to ensure that women living with HIV have their reproductive health needs met.
• Improve national level capacity to track and report on progress, gaps and opportunities through better generation and use of sex-disaggregated data and statistics.
• Reduce women’s work burden through investments in infrastructure, labour saving technologies and gender-responsive economic stimulus packages.
• Strengthen accountability for enhancing women’s rights and ending gender discrimination.
• Scale up and account for investments in gender equality, including by institutionalising gender responsive budgeting.