Poverty has a Female Face
In the year 2000, 189 world leaders pledged to achieve the Millennium Development Goals — a set of 8 benchmarks to eradicate extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat major diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development by the year 2015. But progress is moving too slowly to meet the deadline.
World leaders have made the least progress on their promises to women.
The Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) is mobilising worldwide on International Women’s Day to call for gender equality to end poverty. With women representing 70% of the worlds poor, the issue of gender equality in the fight to end poverty has been carried by campaigners to the doors of governments and multilateral instiutions by GCAP coalitions since 2005.
GCAP campaigning to achieve gender equity
GCAP Partners from around the world have been campaigning to achieve equality and end poverty. This slideshow portrays some of that work.
UNICEF is marking International Women’s Day 2008 (8 March) by drawing attention to the need for improvements in maternal health care.
Better access to maternal health care will reduce the estimated half a million pregnancy related deaths that occur each year and also help reduce child mortality rates.
Women and the MDGs Fact Sheet
In September 2000, the leaders of the world committed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to end poverty and make development a reality for all people by 2015.
The world now stands at the halfway point towards making the Goals a reality, but results have been uneven.
To ensure the world realizes its potential to make poverty history, significant progress must be made to ensure gender equity.
Ana Agostino - The Importance of Women in Ending Poverty
Ana Agostino is Co-Chair of GCAP and the facilitator for the Feminist
Task Force (FTF) . This year the FTF use the International Women’s Day
to highlight the centrality of gender equality to end poverty and the
importance of investing in women and girls. They are also calling for
financing of gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Bharati Silawal-Giri: Gender and Development Adviser at UNDP
Bharati Silawal-Giri talks about the importance of women in eradicating poverty on the occasion of International Women’s Day
When the 189 UN Member States adopted the Millennium Declaration in 2000, they committed their respective governments to drastically cut the incidence of poverty by half and make the world a better place for everybody to live not later than 2015. The commitments in the declaration are espoused in a set of eight goals with achievable targets, commonly referred to as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Interview with Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem
The past year has marked the half-way point for realisation of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) . The eight goals were agreed on by global leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, with 2015 set as the deadline for achieving the MDGs.
Denouncing violence against women as “one of the most heinous, systematic and prevalent human rights abuses in the world,” United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has vowed to lead a campaign against the scourge.
In a message marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, commemorated on 25 November, Mr. Ban hailed progress in addressing the issue, but said there is “so much left to do to tear down the veil of tolerance which still sometimes surrounds it.”
