The empowerment and autonomy of women and the improvement of their political, social, economic and health status is a significant end in itself. In addition, it is essential for the achievement of sustainable development. The full participation and partnership of both women and men are required in productive and reproductive life, including shared responsibilities for the care and nurturing of children and household maintenance. In all parts of the world, women are facing threats to their lives, health, and well-being due to being overburdened with work and their lack of power and influence. In most regions of the world, women receive less formal education than men, and at the same time, women’s knowledge, abilities, and coping mechanisms often go unrecognized. The power relations that impede women’s attainment of healthy and fulfilling lives operate at many levels of society, from the most personal to the highly public.
Achieving change requires policy and programme actions that will improve women’s access to secure livelihoods and economic resources, alleviate their extreme responsibilities about housework, remove legal impediments to their participation in public life, and raise social awareness through effective programmes of education and mass communication. In addition, improving the status of women also enhances their decision-making capacity at all levels in all spheres of life, especially in the area of sexuality and reproduction. This, in turn, is essential for the long-term success of population programmes.
Experience shows that population and development programmes are most effective when steps have simultaneously been taken to improve the status of women. Education is one of the most important means of empowering women with the knowledge, skills and self-confidence necessary to participate fully in the development process. More than one-third of the world’s adults, most of them women, have no access to printed knowledge, to new skills or to technologies that would improve the quality of their lives and help them shape and adapt to social and economic change.
There are 130 million children who are not enrolled in primary school, and 70 per cent are girls. Countries should act to empower women and should take steps to eliminate
inequalities between men and women.
