Women's Empowerment

What is UNDP doing to promote equality between women and men?

An El Salvadorian girl washes
dishes.

UNDP promotes equality between women and men through 'gender mainstreaming.' The organization's corporate strategy on gender is designed to integrate the promotion of women's empowerment and equality fully in the organization's core business. This strategy calls for gender mainstreaming to become everyone's job – not the responsibility of a small number of specialists. It rests on three pillars:

Priorities of the corporate gender action plan include monitoring the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); reducing the incidence of HIV among vulnerable women; promoting women's empowerment through democratic governance, decentralization and civil society participation; and developing women's capacities through training, knowledge-sharing and networking.

UNDP's multi-year funding framework includes a mechanism to ensure that gender equality is effectively integrated in all UNDP service lines and programmes. Accountability tools include a gender mainstreaming scorecard, which tracks overall progress at the corporate level; the review of manager and staff performance in gender mainstreaming as part of the yearly appraisal process; and new indicators to track results.