Women in Development

A/RES/68/227No PDF available

Who created this mandate?

A Resolution of the General Assembly, under agenda item 23bWomen in development, published in 2014.

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).

What subjects does this mandate have?

16 topics

Data Collection Decent Work Development Assistance Development Strategies Empowerment Gender Budgeting Gender Discrimination Gender Equality Gender Mainstreaming Gender-Based Violence Hiv/Aids Prevention Microcredit Women in Development Women's Advancement Women's Employment Women's Health

Which reports were submitted under this mandate?

1 report of the Secretary-General submitted under this mandate, 2015.

2015A/70/256Women in development report of the Secretary-General

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

What does this mandate say?

53 operative paragraphs

Takes note of the report of the Secretary-General;

Calls upon Member States, the United Nations system and other international and regional organizations, within their respective mandates, and all sectors of civil society, including non-governmental organizations, as well as all women and men, to fully commit themselves and to intensify their contributions to the implementation of the Beijing DeclarationError: Reference source not found and Platform for ActionError: Reference source not found and the outcome of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly,Error: Reference source not found and the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development;

Recognizes the mutually reinforcing links between gender equality and poverty eradication and the achievement of all of the Millennium Development Goals, as well as the need to elaborate and implement, where appropriate, in consultation with all relevant stakeholders, comprehensive gender-sensitive poverty eradication strategies that address social, structural and macroeconomic issues;

Emphasizes the need to link policies on economic and social development to ensure that all people, including those living in poverty and in vulnerable situations, benefit from inclusive economic growth and development, in accordance with the goals of the Monterrey Consensus of the International Conference on Financing for DevelopmentError: Reference source not found and the Doha Declaration on Financing for Development: outcome document of the Follow-up International Conference on Financing for Development to Review the Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus;Error: Reference source not found

Urges Member States, the organizations of the United Nations system and non-governmental organizations to accelerate their efforts and provide adequate resources to increase the voice and full and equal participation of women in all decision-making bodies at the highest levels of government and in the governance structures of international organizations, including through eliminating gender stereotyping in appointments and promotions, to build women’s capacity as agents of change and to empower them to participate actively and effectively in the design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting of national development, poverty eradication and environmental policies, strategies and programmes;

Encourages Member States to continue to increase, as appropriate, the participation of civil society, including women’s organizations, in government decision-making in national development policy areas;

Encourages Member States and the United Nations system to ensure systematic attention to, recognition of and support for the crucial role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflict, in mediation and peacebuilding efforts and in the rebuilding of post-conflict societies, inter alia, through promoting women’s capacity, leadership and engagement in political and economic decision-making;

Expresses deep concern about the ongoing adverse impacts, particularly on development, of the world financial and economic crisis, recognizing evidence of an uneven and fragile recovery, and cognizant that the global economy, notwithstanding significant efforts that helped contain tail risks, improve financial market conditions and sustain recovery, still remains in a challenging phase, with downside risks, inter alia, for women and girls, including high volatility in global markets, high unemployment, particularly among youth, indebtedness in some countries and widespread fiscal strains that pose challenges for global economic recovery and reflect the need for additional progress towards sustaining and rebalancing global demand, and stresses the need for continuing efforts to address systemic fragilities and imbalances and to reform and strengthen the international financial system while implementing the reforms agreed to date, and to address the challenges posed by climate change for women and girls, and in respect of maintaining adequate levels of funding for the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women;

Stresses the importance of the creation by Member States, international organizations, including the United Nations, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, trade unions and other stakeholders of a favourable and conducive national and international environment in all areas of life for the effective integration of women and girls in development, and of their undertaking and disseminating a gender analysis of policies and programmes related to macroeconomic stability, structural reform, taxation, investments, including foreign direct investment, and all relevant sectors of the economy;

Urges the donor community, Member States, international organizations, including the United Nations, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, trade unions and other stakeholders to strengthen the focus and impact of development assistance targeting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls through gender mainstreaming, the funding of targeted activities and enhanced dialogue between donors and partners, and to also strengthen the mechanisms needed to measure effectively the resources allocated to incorporating gender perspectives in all areas of development assistance;

Urges Member States to incorporate a gender perspective, commensurate with gender-equality goals, into the design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting of national development strategies, to ensure alignment between national action plans on gender equality and national development strategies and to encourage the involvement of men and boys in the promotion of gender equality, and in this regard calls upon the United Nations system to support national efforts to develop methodologies and tools and to promote capacity-building and evaluation;

Encourages Member States to ensure inclusive and more effective participation of national mechanisms for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the formulation of national development strategies, including strategies aimed at eradicating poverty and reducing inequalities, and calls upon the United Nations system to support national efforts in this regard;

Also encourages Member States, as appropriate, to strengthen capacities for gender mainstreaming by allocating adequate financial and human resources to national women’s machineries as well as to and within line ministries, establishing and/or strengthening dedicated units for gender equality and the empowerment of women, providing capacity development for technical staff and developing tools and guidelines;

Encourages Member States, the United Nations system and donor countries to strengthen gender-responsive planning and budgeting processes and to develop and strengthen methodologies and tools for this purpose, as well as for the monitoring and evaluation of investments for gender-equality results, as appropriate, and encourages donors to mainstream a gender perspective in their practices, including joint coordination and accountability mechanisms;

Encourages Member States to adopt and implement legislation and policies designed to promote the reconciliation of work and family responsibilities, including through increased flexibility in working arrangements, such as part-time work, and the facilitation of breastfeeding for working mothers, to provide care facilities for children and other dependants and to ensure that both women and men have access to maternity or paternity, parental and other forms of leave and are not discriminated against when availing themselves of such benefits;

Expresses deep concern about the pervasiveness of violence against women and girls, reiterates the need to further intensify efforts to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls, and recognizes that violence against women and girls is one of the obstacles to the achievement of the objectives of equality, development and peace and that women’s poverty and lack of political, social and economic empowerment, as well as their marginalization, may result from their exclusion from social policies for and the benefits of sustainable development and can place them at increased risk of violence;

Encourages Governments, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, trade unions and other stakeholders to promote and protect the rights of women workers, to take action to remove structural and legal barriers to, as well as eliminate stereotypic attitudes towards, gender equality at work and to initiate positive steps towards promoting equal pay for equal work or for work of equal value and women’s full participation in the formal economy, in particular in economic decision-making;

Encourages the United Nations system and donor countries to support Member States in increasing their investments in policies and programmes with a gender perspective in order to promote women’s access to decent work and in delivering gender-responsive social protection and social services;

Urges Governments to develop, adequately resource and implement active labour-market policies on full and productive employment and decent work for all, including the full participation of women and men in both rural and urban areas;

Urges the United Nations system and other international organizations, upon the request of Member States, to support and promote innovative programme responses to ensure women’s access to decent work, to recognize and contribute to reducing the unequal burden of care work, to promote social protection initiatives and measures for women and girls with a gender perspective, and to support and encourage the scaling-up of existing good-practice programmes and initiatives;

Recognizes that women and girls account for almost half of all international migrants at the global level, and the need to address the special situation and vulnerability of migrant women and girls by, inter alia, incorporating a gender perspective into policies and strengthening national laws, institutions and programmes to prevent and combat gender-based violence, trafficking in persons and discrimination against women and girls,Error: Reference source not found and calls upon Governments to strengthen efforts to protect the rights of, and ensure decent work conditions for, domestic workers, including migrant women and girls, in relation to, inter alia, working hours, work conditions and wages, and to promote access to health-care services and other social and economic benefits;

Encourages Governments and the United Nations system to recognize unremunerated work, including domestic and care work, and to provide support through the development of infrastructure and technologies and the provision of public services, including accessible and quality childcare, incentives such as parental leave, flexible working arrangements and allowances;

Encourages Member States to adopt and/or review and to fully implement gender-sensitive legislation and policies that reduce, through specifically targeted measures, horizontal and vertical occupational segregation and gender-based wage gaps;

Stresses the importance of improving and systematizing the collection, analysis and dissemination of data disaggregated by sex and age and of developing gender indicators that are specific and relevant with respect to supporting policymaking and national systems for monitoring and reporting on progress and impact, and in that regard encourages developed countries and relevant entities of the United Nations system to provide support and assistance to developing countries, upon their request, with respect to establishing, developing and strengthening their databases and information systems;

Encourages Governments to collect, analyse and disseminate sex-disaggregated data and statistics on women’s access to decent work, unremunerated work and social protection and to assess the impact of associated policy measures, in cooperation with the United Nations system and other international organizations, upon the request of Governments;

Also encourages Governments to consider conducting time-use studies and the use of satellite accounts to determine the extent of women’s and girls’ unremunerated work, including domestic and care work, and the impact of associated policy measures, in cooperation with the United Nations system and other international organizations upon the request of Governments;

Urges all Member States to undertake a gender analysis of national labour laws and standards and to establish gender-sensitive policies and guidelines for employment practices, including for transnational corporations, with particular attention to export-processing zones, building in this regard on multilateral instruments, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and conventions of the International Labour Organization;

Stresses the importance of developing national strategies for the promotion of sustainable and productive entrepreneurial activities, and encourages Governments to create a climate that is conducive to increasing the number of women entrepreneurs and the size of their businesses by giving them equal access to financial instruments, providing them with training and advisory services in business, administration and information and communications technologies, facilitating networking and information-sharing and increasing their participation on advisory boards and in other forums so as to enable them to contribute to the formulation and review of policies and programmes being developed by financial institutions;

Urges all Member States to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women with regard to their access to all types of financial services and products, including bank loans, bank accounts, mortgages and other forms of financial credit, regardless of their economic and social status, to support women’s access to legal assistance and to encourage the financial sector to mainstream gender perspectives in their policies and programmes;

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;

Urges Governments to ensure that microfinance programmes focus on developing savings products that are safe, convenient and accessible to women and support women’s efforts to retain control over their savings;

Urges all Governments to eliminate discrimination against women and girls in the field of education and to ensure their equal access to all levels of education;

Encourages Member States to adopt and implement, as appropriate, legislation and policies protecting women’s labour and human rights in the workplace, including with respect to minimum wages, social protection and equal pay for equal work, promoting collective bargaining and providing for recruitment, retention and promotion policies targeting women;

Reaffirms the commitment to women’s equal rights and opportunities in political and economic decision-making and resource allocation and to the removal of any barriers that prevent women from being full participants in the economy, and the resolve to undertake legislative and administrative reforms to give women equal rights with men to economic resources, including access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, credit, inheritance, natural resources and appropriate new technology;

Urges Governments to take measures to facilitate equitable access to land and property rights by providing training designed to make the judicial, legislative and administrative system more responsive to gender-equality issues, to provide legal aid for women seeking to claim their rights, to support the efforts of women’s groups and networks and to carry out awareness campaigns so as to draw attention to the need for women’s equal rights to land and property;

Recognizes the need to enhance employment and income opportunities for all, especially for women and men living in poverty, and encourages Governments to promote decent work for all segments of society and to ensure that labour-market regulations and social provisions create a more level playing field for women, including by enacting and enforcing minimum wage legislation, eliminating discriminatory wage practices and promoting measures such as public works programmes, in order to enable women to cope with recurrent crises and long-term unemployment;

Also recognizes the need to empower women, particularly poor women and girls, economically and politically, and in this regard encourages Governments, with the support of their development partners, to invest in appropriate infrastructure and other projects, including the provision of water and sanitation to rural areas and urban slums, in order to increase health and well-being, relieve the workloads of women and girls and release their time and energy for other productive activities, including entrepreneurship;

Further recognizes the central role of agriculture in development, and stresses the importance of reviewing agricultural policies and strategies to ensure that women’s critical role in food security and nutrition is recognized and addressed as an integral part of both short- and long-term responses to food insecurity, excessive price volatility and food crises in developing countries;

Recognizes the critical role and contribution of rural women, including indigenous women and women in local communities, and their traditional knowledge in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and eradicating rural poverty;

Expresses concern at the overall expansion of the HIV and AIDS epidemic and the fact that in some regions women and girls are still the most affected by HIV and AIDS, that they are more easily infected, that they bear a disproportionate share of the caregiving burden and that they are more vulnerable to violence, stigmatization and discrimination, poverty and marginalization from their families and communities as a result of HIV and AIDS, and taking into account that despite substantial progress, the 2010 deadline of universal access has not been met, calls upon Governments and the international community to urgently scale up responses towards achieving the goal of universal access to comprehensive HIV prevention programmes, treatment, care and support and, in line with the 2011 Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS: Intensifying Our Efforts to Eliminate HIV and AIDS,Error: Reference source not found to ensure that national responses to HIV and AIDS meet the specific needs of women and girls, including those living with and affected by HIV and AIDS across their lifespan;

Reaffirms the commitment to achieve universal access to reproductive health by 2015, as set out in the targets under Goal 5 of the Millennium Development Goals and as supported at the International Conference on Population and Development, by integrating this goal into strategies for attaining the internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the United Nations Millennium DeclarationError: Reference source not found aimed at reducing maternal mortality, improving maternal health, reducing child mortality, promoting gender equality, combating HIV and AIDS and eradicating poverty;

Urges Governments and all sectors of society to promote and to pursue gender-based approaches to the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases based on data disaggregated by sex and age in their effort to address the critical differences in the rapidly growing magnitude of non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases and diabetes, which affect people of all ages, gender, race and income levels, as noted in the political declaration of the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases,Error: Reference source not found and notes that poor populations and those living in vulnerable situations, in particular in developing countries, bear a disproportionate burden and that non-communicable diseases can affect women and men differently, because, inter alia, women bear a disproportionate share of the burden of caregiving;

Encourages Governments and all sectors of society to take sustainable measures to ensure equal access to full and productive employment and decent work on an equal basis and without discrimination to persons with disabilities, including by promoting access to inclusive education systems, skills development and vocational and entrepreneurial training, in order to enable persons with disabilities to attain and maintain maximum independence, as noted in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as well as in the outcome document of the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the realization of the Millennium Development Goals and other internationally agreed development goals for persons with disabilities: the way forward, a disability-inclusive development agenda towards 2015 and beyond,Error: Reference source not found and notes the need to strengthen efforts aimed at addressing the rights and needs of women and children with disabilities;

Expresses deep concern that maternal health remains one area constrained by some of the largest health inequities in the world, and over the uneven progress in improving child and maternal health, in this context calls upon States to implement their commitments to preventing and reducing child and maternal mortality and morbidity, and welcomes in that regard the Secretary-General’s Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health as well as national, regional and international initiatives contributing to the reduction in the number of maternal deaths and deaths of the newborn and children under age 5;

Recognizes that there is a need for all donors to maintain and deliver on their existing bilateral and multilateral official development assistance commitments and targets, and that the full implementation of those commitments will substantially boost resources available to push forward the international development agenda;

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

Encourages the international community, the United Nations system, the private sector and civil society to continue to provide the financial resources necessary to assist 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, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and other relevant United Nations conferences and summits;

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

Calls upon all organizations of the United Nations system, within their organizational mandates, to mainstream a gender perspective and to pursue gender equality in their country programmes, planning instruments, investment frameworks and sector-wide programmes and to articulate specific country-level goals and targets in this domain in accordance with national development strategies, welcomes the work of UN-Women with United Nations country teams in assisting Member States, at their request, in integrating a gender perspective into national development policies and strategies, in accordance with their national priorities, and stresses its important role in leading, coordinating and promoting the accountability of the United Nations system so as to ensure that the commitment to gender equality and gender mainstreaming translates into effective action throughout the world;

Calls upon the organizations of the United Nations development system, within their organizational intergovernmentally agreed mandates, to implement their institutional accountability mechanisms, to deliver on results on gender equality and to report on gender-sensitive indicators in their strategic frameworks;

Recalls Economic and Social Council resolution 2013/18 of 24 July 2013, in which the Council decided that at its fifty-ninth session, in 2015, the Commission on the Status of Women would undertake a review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the outcome of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly, including current challenges that affect the implementation of the Platform for Action and the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women, as well as opportunities for strengthening gender equality and the empowerment of women in the post-2015 development agenda through the integration of a gender perspective;

Requests the Secretary-General to submit to the General Assembly at its seventieth session a report on the progress made in the implementation of the present resolution, including on integrating a gender perspective into national development strategies;

Decides to include in the provisional agenda of its seventieth session, under the item entitled “Eradication of poverty and other development issues”, the sub-item entitled “Women in development”.

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