Gender Overview: Development news, research, data | World Bank
Gender equality is central to the World Bank’s own goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity in a sustainable manner.
Progress and persistence in gender equality matters because gender equality is a core development objective in its own right. Greater gender equality is also smart economics, enhancing productivity and improving other development outcomes, including prospects for the next generation and for the quality of societal policies and institutions. No society can develop sustainably without transforming the distribution of opportunities, resources, and choices for men and women so that they have equal power to shape their own lives and contribute to their families, communities, and countries.
And as SDG5 says, “Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world.”
Women are key to the prevention of disasters: their local knowledge is useful during and after disasters, and they have survival and coping skills in emergencies, including food preservation and physical and mental health care skills.
Climate change is already increasing the intensity and magnitude of natural hazards such as floods, storms, droughts and other severe weather events. These impacts are expected to worsen in the future. Sea levels may rise, low-lying delta areas might be flooded and salt-water intrusion may increase. Although natural disasters happen all over the world, they have a much greater impact on developing countries than on industrialised ones. Economies are less powerful and therefore less able to prevent disasters or to cope with the losses.
Natural disasters are especially likely to affect parts of the population that lack the ability to prepare for the impacts of disaster because of economic limitations or cultural factors. This holds true for both industrialized and developing countries – in industrialised countries, too, it is generally the poor parts of society that are most affected by natural disasters. The effects of extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005, highlight this.
Research has since long found that poverty has a female face, so clearly, the female population is more likely to experience or fall into energy poverty. [Michael Gaida / Pixabay]
Women are more likely to live in energy poverty, something that needs to be reflected in EU policy as it rolls out its renovation wave.
By Michaela Kauer, Director of the Brussels office of the City of Vienna, linking Vienna with EU policy and global sustainability goals.
April 13, 2021 - Currently, the European Union is undertaking significant efforts to improve the energy efficiency of the built environment, with a huge renovation wave strategy brought forward. The aspiration is to make this initiative in the framework of the EU’s Green Deal a participatory and inclusive one.
However, the Commission still fails to clarify whether this approach will be gender-sensitive in vision and process, not the least in delivery. The first issue at stake is to increase the visibility of gender inequalities in energy poverty and participatory actions.
This will allow informing policymakers at the EU level to better account for gender justice in the field of housing and urban renewal.
The 2021 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) | Human Development Reports (undp.org)
The report finds that women and girls living in multidimensional poverty are at higher risk of intimate partner violence.
Direct Link to Full 41-Page 2021 Publication:
2021_mpi_report_en.pdf (undp.org)
Disparities in multidimensional poverty among ethnic groups are consistently high across many countries and in nine ethnic groups more than 90 percent of the population is trapped in poverty, according to new analysis on global multidimensional poverty released today.
The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) produced by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative measures poverty by considering various deprivations experienced by people in their daily lives, including poor health, insufficient education and a low standard of living. Today’s report examines the level and composition of multidimensional poverty across 109 countries covering 5.9 billion people and presents an ethnicity/race/caste disaggregation for 41 countries with available information.
