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Better lives for women: are the Millennium Development Goals leading us to it?

Increasing girls’ access to education and improving women health are two important targets set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But the simple inclusion of gender in the MDGs should not lead to the assumption that gender issues are now central to development policy and that inequalities will be adequately addressed. Changes in institutional practices, greater monetary investments and creating more opportunities for women - are all needed to make these goals a reality.

An article from the Institute of Development Studies assesses the attention given to gender in the MDGs. The author welcomes the specific targets aimed at empowering women in the areas of education and health, but also argues that the Goals – as is the case with most development policies - do not adequately include the issue of gender inequality in defining poverty, setting targets and implementing policies.

Increasing the numbers of children in education is a key goal that includes an explicit commitment to achieving equal access to education for boys and girls. Improving women’s health and reducing the number of women who die in childbirth is another Goal. In addition to this, the only other mention of gender occurs when the number of women having access to paid work outside of agriculture and the number of women in national parliaments are used as indicators of progress towards gender equality.

The author, analysing this, draws attention to the following:

The goals seem to assume that access to education always leads to gender equality: the quality of education matters and the results it can have for girls may be different from that expected.
The specific attention on health and education circumscribes gender issues – to viewing only these as areas where gender inequality should be addressed – while others such as the economy, agriculture or environment are ignored.
The Goal to halve world poverty does not include any reference to the relationship between gender and poverty.
Reviews of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) – which are seen as an important step for poor countries to specify actions towards achieving the Goals - reveal that gender issues have received insufficient attention.
Policy making institutions have a poor understanding of the complex ways in which unequal gender relations play out in the lives of women: they assign simplistic reasons and causes that are inadequate.

From this analysis of gender in relation to the MDGs and to development in general, the author recommends the following:

Gender issues should be taken into account at every level of development policy - setting targets, implementing the required changes and evaluating their progress and achievement.
A new approach to measuring how additional resources actually change gender relations and improve women’s choices should be developed.
Poor women should be more involved in the creation of development policy agendas.
A greater transparency about the way in which governments and development agencies promote and achieve gender equality is needed.

The inclusion of gender equality within the MDGs reflects the long-standing efforts to make gender an important part of development policy. The goals are the first step in the right direction and the challenge now is to take meaningful action to ensure that they are met.

Source(s):
‘Promoting Gender Equality’ by Ramya Subrahmanian in Richard Black and Howard White (eds.) Targeting Development: Critical Perspectives on the Millennium Development Goals London: Routledge, 2004

id21 Research Highlight: 9 July 2004

Further Information:
Ramya Subrahmanian
Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1273 606261
Fax: +44 (0) 1273 621202/691647
Contact the contributor: r.subrahmanian@ids.ac.uk

Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK

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