Social Protection and Care in the Sustainable Development Goals
Care and social protection are both explicitly mentioned in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, the Goals fall short of addressing how gendered power relations can be an impediment to women being able to fully enjoy their human rights. Valeria Esquivel from UNRISD discusses how social protection can contribute...
Read MoreActivist Perspective: Linking Social Protection and Human Rights
How does a rights-based approach support civil society organizations in their advocacy for universal access to social protection? In this video, Priti Darooka, founder and executive director of the Programme on Women’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (India) talks about the role of human rights frameworks in supporting the...
Read MoreDelivering Development Justice? Financing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
The “supremely ambitious and transformative vision” embodied in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes a goal to achieve gender equality for all women and girls and a re-commitment to governments’ human rights obligations. At the same time, governments have agreed to a range of strategies for financing the...
Read MoreRedistributing Unpaid Care and Sustaining Quality Care Services: A prerequisite for gender equality
The centrality of care to sustainable development and its relevance for gender equality are now widely recognized by the global community. In “Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”—also referred to as “Agenda 2030” —unpaid care appears as one of the targets under Sustainable Development Goal 5...
Read MoreCash Transfer Programmes, Poverty Reduction and Empowerment of Women in South Africa (GED Working Paper no. 4/2015)
This working paper is one of the five country studies on cash transfer programmes and women’s empowerment. The review of the South African experience in this study is complemented by country studies on Brazil, Chile, India and Mexico. Its results have also informed a comparative study, authored by Elaine...
Read MoreGender Equality, Child Development and Job Creation: How to reap the ‘triple dividend’ from early childhood education and care services
This brief synthesizes research findings, analysis and policy recommendations for realizing the triple dividend from early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. ECEC services have come to occupy an important place on the global policy agenda. While some developed countries have long invested in this area, a growing number...
Read MoreUN Women Policy Brief Series
The UN Women policy brief series synthesizes research findings, analysis and policy recommendations on key policy areas around gender equality and women’s rights in an accessible format. The series aims to bridge the research and policy divide by identifying issues that require urgent policy attention and propose a set...
Read MoreCash transfer programmes, poverty reduction and empowerment of women in South Africa
Cash transfer programmes have been implemented in many countries as a key component of their national social protection floors and because these programmes provide a modest but regular income to poor households, they have the potential to reduce poverty and to enhance women’s economic empowerment. However, there have been...
Read MoreSocial Protection Brief: Violence against Women and Girls
The definition of social protection programmes varies widely, as do the types of interventions included and the specific outcomes sought. These programmes can be implemented through public and/or private sectors, with the involvement of single or multiple government sectors, or by some combination of these actors. This brief will...
Read MoreWomen Workers and the Politics of Claims-Making in a Globalizing Economy
The paper analyses the evolving politics of claims-making by women workers in the Global South in the context of a globalized economy. It addresses the following questions. What kinds of claims are prioritized in relation to women workers? Who is making these claims? To whom are they addressed? What...
Read MoreEnabling Aspirations, Realizing Rights: Social Protection for Adolescent Girls
Adolescent girls’ rights and their power to drive social change and achieve inclusive are crucial to sustainable human development. This recognition comes at a time of increased global interest in understanding and offering solutions to the challenges girls face as they enter the second decade of their lives. Aspirations...
Read MoreMaking Social Policy Work for Women
Social policy is fundamental to the quest for social justice, women’s rights and gender equality. Defined broadly as a set of public interventions that affect the welfare and well-being of citizens, social policy is typically understood to cover issues such as income security, health, housing and education. It is...
Read MoreProgress of the World’s Women: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights
Twenty years after the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and at a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the international consensus on the need to achieve gender equality seems stronger than ever before. Empowering women and...
Read MoreThe Gender Dimensions of Pension Systems: Policies and Constraints for the Protection of Older Women
This paper documents the pervasiveness of women’s lack of income security in old age across a large number of countries, but also points to a number of important policy measures that can be taken to address gender pension gaps. It focuses on how pension systems interact with other social...
Read MoreDiscussion Papers Series
The UN Women discussion paper series is a new initiative led by the Research and Data section of UN Women, to provide grounded, fresh and robust perspectives on some of the contemporary challenges to achieving gender equality and women’s rights, and offer insights into policy innovations that are making...
Read MoreHow can Social Protection Provide Social Justice for Women?
A feminist social protection programme recognises and enhances women’s identity as citizens and enables them to assume the roles they choose and fulfil the obligations they value. It is an approach that defines, targets and alleviates poverty in accordance with the views, priorities and experiences of the women beneficiaries...
Read MoreCash transfer programmes, poverty reduction and empowerment of women: A comparative analysis
This publication summarizes existing knowledge on the impact of cash transfers on women. These transfers are of relevance for gender equality, first, because as a group, women spend fewer years in paid employment than men, receive lower wages, and live longer. All three differences increase women’s risks of poverty....
Read MoreWomen’s Rights to Social Security and Social Protection (First Edition)
This collection examines the human rights to social security and social protection from a women’s rights perspective. The contributors stress the need to address women’s poverty and exclusion within a human rights framework that takes account of gender. The chapters unpack the rights to social security and protection and...
Read MoreWomen’s sexual and reproductive rights in the Philippines
Summary In 1991, the Philippines delegated responsibility for “people’s health and safety” to the local level. In exercise of this power, an executive order 003 (“EO 003”) was issued in Manila, in 2000 which declared that the city would take an “affirmative stand on pro-life issues”. In response to...
Read MoreSupporting workers with family responsibilities: Connecting child development and the decent work agenda
This working paper presents a series of solutions to the challenging social issues. It builds on the conclusions of “Investing in Child Development and Learning: Ensuring Equity in Decent Work and Sustainable Development,” a forum convened by UNICEF and ILO on 28 February 2012. This paper was used to...
Read MoreWhat does care have to do with human rights? Analysing the impact on women’s rights and gender equality
Unpaid care work is a critical human rights issue, as well as a major obstacle to gender equality and poverty reduction. This article draws attention to the impact of heavy, intensive, and unequal burdens of unpaid care work on the human rights of women living in poverty, and analyses...
Read MoreThe Care Economy In Latin America: Putting care at the centre of the agenda
The first section clarifies the theoretical evolution of the concept of the “care economy” in the English-speaking literature, the ways in which it has been used and understood in the region, and its intersections with “care” and with “the economy.” The second section reveals the limits that the construction...
Read MoreWhat is a transformative approach to care, and why do we need it?
The meanings of care are contested – the approaches to care in the development and feminist literature have varied greatly. At the same time, care is a common word, loaded with moral meanings concerning notions of duty and love, and care is commonly associated with women. These associations are...
Read MoreProgress of The World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights
A comprehensive approach to social policy that combines universal access to social services with social protection through contributory and noncontributory transfer systems is the best way to realize economic and social rights for all without discrimination. Currently, only 27 per cent of the world’s population enjoys full access to...
Read MoreCombating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics
This report argues that this is because many current approaches to reducing poverty and inequality fail to consider key institutional, policy and political dimensions that may be both causes of poverty and inequality, and obstacles to their reduction. Moreover, when a substantial proportion of a country’s population is poor,...
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