Overview

The Global Development Challenge
The International Vision

In rural Bangladesh, non-formal schools provide primary education for 1.3 million children, mainly girls, who are outside the school system. In Senegal, a network of women's groups promotes rights awareness through street theatre, holds legal information clinics, protects women victims of violence, and provides literacy training. In Ecuador, women's producer groups receive loans; technical and business training; and support in human rights, gender equality, and self-esteem. In Mozambique, a major program targets women's special vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS, with particular attention to mother-to-child transmission.

CIDA is supporting these initiatives and many others to strengthen its own ability, and that of its partners, to promote and support gender equality in developing countries. CIDA recognizes and undertakes gender analysis within all development issues under its mandate, ensuring that the complex power relations between men and women are recognized and that all programs attempt to establish gender equality rather than perpetuate inequality.

---

The Global Development Challenge

Gender equality means that women and men have equal conditions for realizing their full human rights and for contributing to national, political, economic, social, and cultural development. It also means that both women and men benefit equally from the results of that development.

• Currently, there are only nineteen countries where women hold more than 30 percent of parliamentary seats, and globally, women hold a 17 percent share of parliamentary seats.
• Within developing countries, 60% or more of women workers are concentrated in the informal sector (excluding agriculture) and often carry out the most precarious types of work, limiting their access to and control over resources.
• In 2001, the World Health Organization estimated that sexual and reproductive health problems, which disproportionately affect women and girls, constituted 18 percent of the global disease burden.
• Due to persistent gender inequalities, the proportion of women and girls living with HIV is increasing. For example, in Africa, 75 percent of young people (15 to 24) living with HIV are young women.
• Violence against women remains pervasive and affects all societies and countries. UNIFEM estimates that one in three women have been beaten, coerced into sex or experienced some other type of gender-based violence in her lifetime.
• Violence against women is often intensified in situations of state fragility and conflict. The 2006 Secretary-General's Study on Violence against Women estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In addition, sexual violence is widespread in ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Darfur.

This inequality severely limits socio-economic progress, particularly in developing countries, where women are the main food producers, gatherers of water and fuel, primary teachers, health care providers, and labourers in the informal economy.

Sustainable development is dependent on the equal contributions of women and men. Ensuring women's equal participation in the development of their societies requires two things: equal capacity to contribute, and equal opportunity to do so. This means that women's status in areas such as health, education, access to resources, and decision-making must all be improved, and deliberate efforts must be made to ensure that women have an equitable role in shaping the development process.

---

The International Vision

The global community has increasingly rallied around gender equality, beginning in 1975 with a series of world conferences on women. Gender equality issues were also prominent in world conferences on human rights, education, population, social development, and many other areas. These meetings resulted in a number of key international agreements and commitments, including:

• the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women,
• the Beijing Platform for Action, and
• the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The third MDG-gender equality and women's empowerment-is internationally recognized as fundamental to achieving all the MDGs.