Supporting Women and Girls
In the world’s most marginalized communities, girls and women bear the brunt of injustice. Working with communities to fight poverty requires focusing on girls and women so that all people can achieve equality.
When resources are scarce, it’s girls who are often the last to eat and first to be kept home from school. In these same communities, women are frequently denied the right to own the land they’ve farmed their entire lives. And where girls and women do not have the freedom to leave their homes or walk down a street, they struggle to earn a living, attend school or even visit a doctor. Despite the many obstacles they face, women and girls provide critical solutions to everyday problems as individuals, community members, as leaders.
When the private sector advocates for laws that support gender equality, ensures that factories and farms are gender-equal and free from harassment, empowers women employees and provides flexibility for child-care, and uses corporate philanthropy to advance women, the impact pays extra dividends in the fight to achieve gender equality.
What Can Businesses Do?
The United Nations stated, “Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world. Providing women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large.”
Set in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals articulated seventeen global goals for a more sustainable future. Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG5) calls for achieving gender equality and defined 9 Targets and 14 Indicators. Targets specify the goals, and Indicators represent the metrics by which the world aims to track whether these Targets are achieved.
