3. Achieving Gender Equality

Gender equality is central to realising the Millennium agenda, which risks failure without the full participation of all members of society.

Gender equality is pivotal to human progress and produces a double dividend.  It benefits both women and children. The evidence is striking - healthy, educated and empowered women have healthy, educated and confident daughters and sons.

Gender discrimination remains pervasive in the communities served by our international partners.   

It is all too common that:

• Girls are more likely than boys to miss out on secondary education;
• Household decisions are often made through a bargaining process that is more likely to favour men than women;
• Levels of education, earnings and asset ownership, and age gaps are key in determining bargaining power between men and women in the household;
• Domestic violence is a regular feature of daily life threatening the physical health and emotional well being of its victims and often forces them to endure subordinate positions and economic insecurity within the households;
• The consequences for women’s exclusion from household decisions can be as dire for children as they are for women themselves.

SERVE is committed to the achievement of MDG 3 which promotes gender equality and the empowerment of women.  Programmes that increase the influence women have in household decisions have the following impact:

• Significantly improve their children’s nutritional status;
• Improve their children’s survival rates and nutritional status as well as school attendance;
• Promote better health-care practices for the family;
• Increase the likelihood that their children, especially girls, will attend school.  On average, children with uneducated mothers are at least twice as likely to be out of school as children whose mothers attended primary school;
• The proportion of resources devoted to children is far greater than in those which women have a less decisive role.

The pursuit of gender equality is greatly helped when:

• Girls and boys have equal educational opportunities;
• There are safe and without bias free girl’s schools;
• Grassroots women’s movements champion women’s equality and empowerment;
• Women have an important role in politics.