Women in Development

A/RES/58/206No PDF available

Who created this mandate?

A Resolution of the General Assembly, under agenda item 93aWomen in development, published in 2004.

What other versions does this mandate have?

15 versions · 1996–2024

This is an older version — the most recent is A/RES/79/223

2024A/RES/79/223Women in developmentLatestCompare with previous version
2022A/RES/77/181Women in developmentCompare with previous version
2020A/RES/74/235Women in developmentCompare with previous version
2018A/RES/72/234Women in developmentCompare with previous version
2016A/RES/70/219Women in developmentCompare with previous version

Versions are identified automatically by matching titles within the same organ (~97% accuracy on a manual audit).

Which reports were submitted under this mandate?

2 reports of the Secretary-General submitted under this mandate, 2004–2005.

2005A/60/162Women in development the impact of globalization on women's employment and empowerment : report of the Secretary-General
2004A/59/287/Add.1World survey on the role of women in development report of the Secretary-General : addendum : women and international migration

Identified automatically from the metadata in each report’s UN Digital Library catalogue record.

What does this mandate say?

41 operative paragraphs

Takes note of the report of the Secretary-General entitled “The empowerment of women and integration of gender perspectives in the promotion of economic growth, poverty eradication and sustainable development”;

Reaffirms the goals and commitments contained in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and also in the political declaration and further actions and initiatives to implement the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action adopted by the General Assembly at its twenty-third special session;

Calls upon Governments, the relevant entities of the United Nations system, within their respective mandates, and all relevant actors of civil society, including non-governmental organizations, to continue to take effective action to achieve full and effective implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the outcome of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly;

Stresses the importance of creating a favourable and conducive national and international environment in all fields of life for the effective integration of women in development;

Urges all Governments to develop and promote strategies to mainstream a gender perspective in the design and implementation of economic and development policies and in the monitoring and evaluation of related programmes of action;

Recognizes the need to mainstream a gender perspective in budget policies at all levels, and calls upon Governments to increase women’s full and equal participation in economic decision-making through, inter alia, their engagement in the budgetary process;

Also recognizes the mutually reinforcing links between gender equality and poverty eradication, as well as the need to elaborate and implement, where appropriate, in consultation with civil society, comprehensive gender-sensitive poverty eradication strategies that address social, structural and macroeconomic issues;

Further recognizes the need to strengthen the capacity of Governments to incorporate a gender perspective in policies and decision-making, and encourages all Governments, international organizations, including the United Nations system, and other relevant stakeholders to assist and support developing countries in integrating a gender perspective in all aspects of policy-making, including through the provision of technical assistance and financial resources;

Stresses the importance of developing national strategies for the promotion of sustainable and productive entrepreneurial activities that will generate income among disadvantaged women and women living in poverty;

Urges all Governments to ensure women’s equal rights with men and their full and equal access to education, training, employment, technology and economic and financial resources, including credit, in particular for rural women and women in the informal sector, and to facilitate, where appropriate, the transition of women from the informal to the formal sector;

Encourages Governments, the private sector, non-governmental organizations and other actors of civil society to promote and protect the rights of women workers, to take action to remove structural and legal barriers as well as stereotypical attitudes to gender equality at work and to initiate positive steps to promote equal pay for equal work or work of equal value;

Urges all Governments to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women with regard to their access to bank loans, mortgages and other forms of financial credit, giving special attention to poor, uneducated women, and to support women’s access to legal assistance;

Calls upon Governments and entrepreneurial associations to facilitate the access of women, including young women and women entrepreneurs, to education and training in business, administration, and information and communication technologies;

Recognizes the role of microfinance, including microcredit, in the eradication of poverty, the empowerment of women and the generation of employment, notes in this regard the importance of sound national financial systems, and encourages the strengthening of existing and emerging microcredit institutions and their capacities, including through the support of international financial institutions;

Stresses the need for assistance to enable women in developing countries, particularly grass-roots women’s groups, to have full access to and use of new technologies, including information technologies, for their empowerment;

Urges States to design and revise laws that ensure that women are accorded full and equal rights to own land and other property, including through inheritance, and to undertake administrative reforms and other necessary measures to give women the same right as men to credit, capital and appropriate technologies and access to markets and information;

Calls upon Governments to encourage the financial sector to mainstream a gender perspective in its policies and programmes, in particular by:

Exploring viable options with respect to reaching people living in poverty, in particular women, including through international public and/or private funds;

Designing savings schemes that are attractive to the poor, and to poor women in particular;

Undertaking research to learn more about the characteristics, financial needs and performance of businesses owned by women;

Working towards equal treatment for women clients through comprehensive gender-awareness training for staff at all levels and better representation of women in decision-making positions;

Requests Governments to ensure the full and equal participation of women in decision-making and in policy formulation and implementation at all levels so that their priorities, skills and potentials can be adequately reflected in national policy;

Calls upon Governments to promote, inter alia, through legislation, family-friendly and gender-sensitive work environments, the facilitation of breastfeeding for working mothers and the provision of the necessary care for working women’s children and other dependants and to consider promoting policies and programmes, as appropriate, to enable men and women to reconcile their work, social and family responsibilities;

Expresses its concern that the HIV/AIDS pandemic reinforces gender inequalities, that women and girls bear a disproportionate share of the burden imposed by the HIV/AIDS crisis, that they are more easily infected, that they play a key role in care and that they have become more vulnerable to poverty as a result of the HIV/AIDS crisis;

Calls upon the international community to make efforts to mitigate the effects of excess volatility and economic disruption, which have a disproportionately negative impact on women, and to enhance trade opportunities for developing countries in order to improve the economic situation of women;

Urges the international community, the United Nations system and relevant organizations to give priority to assisting the efforts of developing countries to ensure the full and effective participation of women in deciding and implementing development strategies and integrating gender concerns into national programmes, including by providing adequate resources to operational activities for development in support of the efforts of Governments to ensure full and equal access of women to health care, capital, education, training and technology, as well as full and equal participation in all decision-making;

Recognizes that a substantial increase in official development assistance and other resources will be required if developing countries are to achieve the internationally agreed development goals and objectives, including those contained in the United Nations Millennium Declaration,3 and that in order to build support for official development assistance, cooperation will be needed in further improving policies and development strategies, both nationally and internationally, to enhance aid effectiveness;

Urges developed countries that have not yet done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product as official development assistance to developing countries and 0.15 to 0.20 per cent of the gross national product of developed countries to least developed countries, as reconfirmed at the Third United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries, held in Brussels from 14 to 20 May 2001, encourages developing countries to build on progress achieved in ensuring that official development assistance is used effectively to help to achieve development goals and targets, acknowledges the efforts of all donors, commends those donors whose official development assistance contributions exceed, reach or are increasing towards the targets, and stresses the importance of undertaking to examine the means and time frames for achieving the targets and goals;

Encourages the international community, the United Nations system, the private sector and civil society to continue to provide the necessary financial resources to assist national Governments in their efforts to meet the development targets and benchmarks agreed upon at the World Summit for Social Development, the Fourth World Conference on Women, the International Conference on Population and Development, the Millennium Summit, the International Conference on Financing for Development, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the Second World Assembly on Ageing, the twenty-third and twenty-fourth special sessions of the General Assembly and other relevant United Nations conferences and summits;

Encourages the United Nations system and international and regional organizations, as appropriate, to assist Governments, at their request, in building institutional capacity and developing national action plans or further implementing existing action plans for the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action;

Urges Governments to create and maintain a non-discriminatory and gender-sensitive legal environment by reviewing legislation, with a view to striving to remove discriminatory provisions as soon as possible, preferably by 2005, and eliminating legislative gaps that leave women and girls without protection of their rights and without effective recourse against gender-based discrimination, and encourages assistance to countries in achieving this aim;

Urges multilateral donors, and invites international financial institutions, within their respective mandates, and regional development banks to review and implement policies to support national efforts to ensure that a higher proportion of resources reach women, in particular in rural and remote areas;

Welcomes the convening of the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Geneva from 10 to 12 December 2003, and its second phase, to be held in Tunis from 16 to 18 November 2005, and encourages Governments and all other stakeholders to integrate a gender perspective in the preparatory processes and outcome documents, taking into account the agreed conclusions on women’s participation in and access to the media and information and communication technologies and their impact on and use as an instrument for the advancement and empowerment of women, adopted by the Commission on the Status of Women at its forty-seventh session and endorsed by the Economic and Social Council in its resolution 2003/44 of 22 July 2003, and the report of the Secretary-General;Error: Reference source not found

Encourages Governments, international organizations, including the United Nations system, the private sector and civil society to fully incorporate a gender perspective into the implementation of and follow-up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the International Conference on Financing for Development and to implement the specific recommendations on microfinance and microcredit for women and gender budget policies;

Stresses the importance of collecting all relevant information needed on the role of women in development and statistics disaggregated by sex by all countries, encourages the relevant entities of the United Nations to support national efforts, especially those of developing countries, and in this regard invites developed countries, relevant entities of the United Nations and other international organizations to provide support and assistance to developing countries, upon their request, with respect to establishing, developing and strengthening their databases and information systems, and encourages all Governments and international organizations, including the United Nations system, to collect information needed on the role of women in development and the disaggregation by sex of all statistics;

Urges all Governments and international organizations, including the United Nations system, to incorporate a gender perspective in their planning and evaluation, including in common country assessments, the United Nations Development Assistance Framework and poverty reduction strategy papers, where they exist;

Encourages the involvement, as appropriate, of relevant stakeholders, including the private sector and civil society, in mainstreaming a gender perspective in planning and evaluation;

Calls upon the United Nations system to integrate gender mainstreaming into all its programmes and policies, including in the integrated follow-up to United Nations conferences, in accordance with agreed conclusions 1997/2 on gender mainstreaming adopted by the Economic and Social Council at its substantive session of 1997, and welcomes the decision of the Council to devote one of the two themes of the coordination segment of its substantive session of 2004 to the review and appraisal of the system-wide implementation of those agreed conclusions;

Reiterates its request to the Secretary-General to update the World Survey on the Role of Women in Development for the consideration of the General Assembly at its fifty-ninth session, noting that the survey should focus, as in the past, on selective emerging development issues that have an impact on the role of women in the economy at the national, regional and international levels;

Requests the Secretary-General to submit to the General Assembly at its sixtieth session a report on the progress made in the implementation of the present resolution, including the impact of globalization on the empowerment of women and their integration in development;

Decides to include in the provisional agenda of its sixtieth session the sub-item entitled “Women in development”.

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Women in Development

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