Catalog

Gender and the MDGs
ADB Review [ January - February 2004 ]

By Caren Grown
Director, Poverty Reduction and Economic Growth Team, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), and Member, ADB’s External Forum on Gender and Developmentt

Background

At the Millennium Summit held in 2000, 189 governments made a commitment to achieve eight goals that are labeled the Millennium Development Goals - MDGs.

The MDGs offer an opportunity to attend to the unfinished business of development—yet another opportunity, and perhaps the last as an international community — to fulfill the promises made through the decades by world leaders to reduce poverty, end hunger, improve health, and eliminate illiteracy.

The third goal among the eight seeks to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women. The inclusion of this goal in the MDGs marks the culmination of many years of discussions and debates, and is related most directly to the discussions and promises made in four United Nations conferences held in 3 consecutive years in the mid-1990s.

In setting this goal, governments recognized the contributions that women make to economic development and the costs to societies of the multiple disadvantages that women face in nearly every country.

Each MDG contains a time-bound target for achieving the goal. The target selected to represent the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women is eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and in all levels of education no later than 2015.

Although the focus on education is justified in light of the evidence that investing in girls’ education yields high returns, education alone is insufficient for eliminating the range of gender inequalities or for empowering women to participate in society.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women can remain elusive goals—without the opportunity to fully use education to obtain decent employment or to participate fully in decision making in the political arena.

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Elusive Gender Equality

In addition to time-bound targets, all MDGs also contain a set of indicators that countries and international agencies are encouraged to use for tracking progress toward the goal.

Although there has been progress since 1990, a recent analysis conducted by the International Center for Research on Women for the Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality reveals that no country has achieved gender equality.

The analysis shows that a significant number of countries will miss the target for gender parity in primary and secondary school enrolment in both 2005 and 2015. For primary school enrollment, 25 of 124 countries that have data are predicted to be falling behind or seriously offtrack.

For secondary enrollment, 32 of 118 countries that have data are predicted to be falling behind or offtrack. The female share of paid, nonagricultural wage employment is less than 50% in 96 out of 105 countries for which data are available. In the political arena, women hold 30% or more of the seats in their national parliaments in only 11 countries and less than 20% in the majority of countries worldwide.

And, in nearly 50 population-based surveys from around the world, 10–50% of women report being hit or physically harmed by an intimate male partner at some point in their lives.

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Four Priorities

If the global community is to make up for lost time and accelerate the pace of progress toward Goal 3, immediate attention must be paid to the following four priorities that will help fulfill decades of promises to women.

First, achieving gender equality—in education, health, labor markets, political life, and social opportunities—is fundamental to achieving all MDGs, including reducing poverty, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing global partnerships for development.

According to a recent World Bank paper, “attempting to meet the MDGs without promoting gender equality will both increase the costs and reduce the likelihood of attaining the goals.”

Second, investing in the education, health, safety, and economic well-being of adolescents, especially girls, is a priority. Today’s generation of adolescents—1.2 million—is the largest in the world’s history, and actions that respond to their needs and rights are urgently needed.

Priority actions include opportunities for secondary education (which is itself a strategy to stimulate higher enrollment and continuation at primary levels); support for a successful transition to work; access to sexual and reproductive health information, education, and services; and protection from violence.

Third, reducing women’s and girls’ time-poverty through well-designed, gender-sensitive infrastructure investments and public policies that support women’s care responsibilities is critical. In every country that has time-use data, studies show that women work significantly longer hours per day than men.

In low-income countries, the lack of adequate infrastructure forces women and girls to spend many hours in tasks such as collecting fuel and water. Investments in electrification and healthy cooking fuel that are an alternative to biomass—such as LPG, kerosene, and improved cook stoves—would free girls to go to school and women to participate in other productive activities. In all countries, public policies and support services for children, the elderly, and the disabled would go far to reduce women’s time-poverty.